A FAMILY QUARREL 

An Allegorical Study in American 
Origins and Principles 



GEORGE MURRAY KLEPFER, D. D. 

Author of 
"The Young Man's Best Friends" 



Introduction by 

REV. S. PARKES CADMAN, D. D., LL. D., 

New York City 



AUTHOR'S EDITION 

CARLISLE, PENN'A 



E'l 



79 



.K^'A^ 



The Author makes grateful acknowledgment of 
valuable assistance given in the preparation of this 
volume, by the following: 

Dr. Leon C. Prince, Department of History, in Dick- 
inson College. 

Dr. B. O. McIntire, Department of English and 
American Literature in Dickinson College. 

Dr. Orlando B. Super, Professor of Romance Lan- 
guages, in Dickinson College. 



Copyright 1913, by 
GEORGE MURRAY KLEPFER. 



^/ 



d-^i 



QCi.A851507 



DEDICATION: 

To 

W. C. QUINN, M. D., 

In grateful remembrance of the tender and 

inspiring 

FRIENDSHIP 

OF OUR EARLIER YEARS, 

This book is most affectionately 

DEDICATED. 



INTRODUCTION. 

Pericles exhorted the Athenians to contemplate 
the greatness of their city until they became en- 
raptured with its fame and beauty. He pointed 
exultantly to those achievements in art, literature, 
science and philosophy which had made the Queen 
of the Grecian isles the teacher of the nations and 
the vital center of classic civilization. "We do not 
copy our neighbors/' said the ancient statesman, 
"but are an example unto them; and we rely, 
not upon management nor trickery, but upon 
our own hearts and hands." 

Any similar exhortation that fosters in the 
hearts of Americans a deeper love for our Re- 
public and a proper pride in its achievements 
should be warmly welcomed throughout the land. 
Nor can intelligent patriotism render a better ser\^- 
ice than to furnish a more accurate knowledge 
and kindle a more just appreciation of the deter- 
mining factors in our national evolution. For a 
nation, like an individual, has a soul as well as 
a body. The deeper secrets of its being are hid- 



6 A FAMILY QUARREL. 

den beneath the surface events of its history. 
Those who view only the external features of 
the United States, are apt to be misled in their 
estimates, and they generally mislead others who 
hastily accept as true their superficial notions. 
"The things which are seen are temporal, the 
things which are unseen are eternal," and the lat- 
ter essentials are only revealed to reverent and 
patient research. The underlying and permanent 
realities which make the philosophy of history 
must be sifted from the accidents and appearances 
which change with every momentary disturbance. 
Such realities explain the past and indicate the 
way of the future: they also inevitably falsify 
any forecasts which do not reckon on their ef- 
fectual working. 

It is the object of Dr. Klepfer^s book to fur- 
nish a vantage ground of peculiar interest to the 
student, whereon he can stand to survey our na- 
tion's past and anticipate its future. It is in- 
spired by a fine temper of Christian optimism, and 
prompts in those who read it a more commanding 
and moralised passion for the glorious land of 
their birth or adoption. In a day of severe and 



INTRODUCTION. 



measurably deserved criticism of our institutions 
and social shortcomings, this busy yet scholarly 
pastor bids us turn aside and remember all the 
way the hand of God has led His chosen people 
these many years. To that God we render praise 
and homage, and we share the author^s faith and 
inspiration for a national growth towards the 
noblest attainable ideals. For these and other 
reasons we heartily commend Dr. Klepfer's mod- 
est production and would bespeak for it a wide 
circulation and a careful perusal. 

S. PAEKES CADMAN. 
Central Church, 

Brooklyn. 
May 23, 1913. 



SOME FOEEWOKDS 

The Author's Purpose 

Scope and Character of the Book 

Limitations of the Story 

This Particular Quarrel 

Quarrelsome People 
A Family Worth Knowing 



SOME FOREWORDS. 11 

^JTT The story with which these pages have to 
^1 1 1 do revolves around the greatest moral and 
^] I political movement of modern times. 
The author's sole purpose in telling it again, 
thus increasing the already voluminous litera- 
ture on the subject, is to help American citi- 
zens, and those seeking to become such, to value 
more highly the great price paid through 
more than a thousand years of struggle, in 
blood and tears, for that great thing called 
American Christian Civilization; and to help, as 
well, toward a more intelligent and reasonable 
understanding of the age-old principles upon 
Avhich American citizenship is based. 

And how very interesting it is to go back and 
trace the causes which, in the remote past, had 
so much influence in shaping the outward forms of 
our religion and our Government, as well as in 
refining and chastening their spirit. Whatever 
may be our objection to the Puritans, and they 
were not without their faults any more than we 
are without faults, it may be said with certainty 
that on this side of the world the vast majority 
of Christian congregations, and the chief institu- 
tions of our Eepublic, are still under the influence 
of their principles and opinions to a very large 
extent. So much so, indeed, that it is impos- 
sible for us to understand ourselves, or to know 



12 A FAMILY QUARBEL. 

our origin and history as a people, without an 
acquaintance with the great struggle for liberty 
of conscience in England and on the continent 
of Europe in the century preceding the first 
settlements in New England. And this momen- 
tous struggle was but the fruit of a tree planted 
far back toward the very beginnings of human 
history. This tree had been wracked by many 
a storm until at times it seemed as though it 
would be uprooted from the earth, but it has 
grown through the ages, spreading its branches 
over the nations and is to-day dropping its seed 
into the fertile soil of all the lands of the earth. 

In order to give some degree of unity and 
coherence, as well as of romantic interest, to the 
story, it is cast into a mildly allegorical form. 

The writer fully recognizes the limitations of 
this literary form. The reader, therefore, needs 
to be reminded at the beginning that this is 
not intended to be a detailed history, but rather 
a broad general survey — a sort of bird's-eye view, 
— of a great movement which covered centuries 
and involved the most vital interests and insti- 
tutions of the peoples of two continents. 

The incidents are made to turn upon the two 
cardinal principles of our Kepublican government. 
Civil Liberty and Federal Union. The varying 
fortunes of these two fundamental principles are 



SOME FOREWORDS. 



13 



traced from their earliest available historical 
sources down the stream of Democracy until they 
are brought together in the Constitution of the 
United States, and until, nearly a century later, 
they are subjected to that severest of all tests of 
stable government, the crucial fires of a great 
Civil War. Out of that dual bath of blood and 
fire the re-united Family arose in fairer renown 
and with heightened prestige among the nations. 
Her free institutions were settled upon deeper 
and stronger foundations and she was cemented 
in every fiber of her frame in a more lasting 
Union. Having rid herself, in the awful testing, 
of a lot of accumulated impedimenta, she came 
forth to live a new life and bear a new mes?age 
to the world. 

A very popular modern writer once said, "Orig- 
inality is not an addition to knowledge; it is only 
a new arrangement of color." No claim what- 
ever is here made of having discovered any new 
facts of history; the utmost degree of originality 
the author can assure his readers of is simply 
a new arrangement of color. These pages pro- 
fess to contain neither a history nor a philosophy 
of the great Puritan movement. The author 
has gleaned in many fields through many years 
and has seen some of the old facts in a new 
light and from a new angle which have given 



14 A FAMILY QUARREL. 

them new meanings to him. To interpret these 
new meanings is his present task. The intelli- 
gence of the reader is relied upon to apply them 
to the problems of the present time. If the tell- 
ing of the story does not suggest the applications 
it would be a vain task to stop at every point 
and label them. 

This particular Quarrel occurred about half a 
century ago. History records no equal fratricidal 
strife. Such was the malignity of hatred, and 
such the bitterness of the conflict, that to the 
utmost each party to the quarrel sought the 
other's destruction. For half a hundred years 
the passions and prejudices of men had been in- 
flamed by angry discussions and by partisan ap- 
peals and evasive compromises, until, almost in 
an hour, the pent-up, smoldering fires burst forth 
like a blast from hades, sweeping a continent with 
their wild hungry flames, threatening the suicide 
of a nation and the destruction of the greatest 
political edifice ever dedicated to the rights and 
conscience of mankind. 

Yet under the same ample roof they live in 
perfect peace and harmony to-day. The fact of 
the Quarrel can never be forgotten — indeed it 
ought never to be forgotten. It has been written 
so deeply into the imperishable pages of his- 
tory that the story of the human race cannot 



SOME FOREWORDS. 15 

be told, without mentioning this event, the mo- 
mentous issues of which are destined to affect 
the weal of the world until the end of time. 
But the bitterness and the passion of the feud 
are rapidly dying out, and the most cordial emo- 
tions of fraternity are reasserting themselves. 
The writer feels assured that every reader of 
these pages will join him, devoutly and heartily, 
in the prayer that such menacing clouds may 
never again darken the skies that overarch a 
land which is the home of more happy people 
than any other land on the face of the earth. 
Quarrelsome people do not, as a rule, make the 
most desirable acquaintances. The Family now 
under consideration, however, is not a quarrelsome 
Family. Though they have had some mighty 
struggles, and though almost every step of their 
progress has been contested by enemies who 
would have rejoiced in defeating their high des- 
tin}^ they are essentially a peace-loving and, what 
is more, a peace-making Family; for though ex- 
tremely youthful, they have already taken their 
place in the very front of the nations that seek 
the peace of the world. For many reasons this 
Family is well worth knowing, and worth know- 
ing well; and as our acquaintance familiarizes us 
with their many excellences of character, and 
with the high idealism and splendid heroisms of 



16 A FAMILY QUAEEEL. 

their phenomenal history, we shall find ourselves 
wanting to know them even better, our apprecia- 
tion increasing in the ratio of our familiarity 
with them. 

Perhaps few families are more liable to mis- 
understanding on a mere surface acquaintance; 
certainly few more richly repay the effort to un- 
derstand their genius and character thoroughly. 
No other Family lives more conspicuously in 
the open eye of the world. And yet the world 
at large, with its characteristic superficial judg- 
ment, has been anything but fair in its estimates. 
In order to avoid this all-too-common error let 
us look beneath the surface of their peculiar 
genius, and trace back the confluent streams of 
their history to as nearly definite sources as pos- 
sible. 



SOME FAMILY HISTORY. 

Seminal Ideas 

Anglo-Saxon 

Danes and Normans 

Primitive Philosophy 

** Time's Noblest Offspring'* 

New Seed for New Soil 

Mixed Bloods 

The Master Passion 



SOME FAMILY IIISTOEY. 19 

^JTT At the very outset we shall discover that 
H^l I both sides of this noted Family are de- 
^1 1 seended from ancient and royally dis- 
tinguished ancestry. And as we pursue the 
study we shall perhapjs with some difficulty per- 
suade ourselves that we are really studying sober 
history, and not perusing some Arabian Nights 
dream. 

Every great race that has left its impress upon 
the civilization of the world has been the em- 
bodiment of some great idea. Around this semi- 
nal idea the life of the race has developed and 
its institutions have crystallized. Among the 
Persians this germinal idea was light. The daily 
prayer of the Egyptian was "Give me wealth." 
The lavish Nile washed all his lands with gold, 
and world-circling traffic roared through mart 
and street. With the Greek this idea was beauty. 
To him the world was plastic and vocal, and was 
peopled with imaged grace and light, finding ex- 
pression in poetry and sculpture and music and 
philosophy. Among the Eomans it was power. 
The vast world was chained a captive to the 
chariot of his pride. He believed the world was 
made to be conquered and that he was made to 
conquer it. The blood of myriad provinces was 
drained to feed the insatible greed of his fierce 
red heart. With the Hebrew it was the purity 



20 A fa:siily quarrel. 

of moral truth — the sovereignty of conscience. 
He became the slave of the Idea, and though 
spumed and scourged, with none to save, he be- 
came inmiortal through the Truth. No floods 
devour him, neither do the fires consume. With 
the Anglo-Saxons the dominant idea was civil 
liberty, a great seminal idea made mighty and 
fruitful throughout the world by its four-fold 
baptism of Spiritual Christianity. 

It will not be seriously questioned that the 
two races which beyond all others have left their 
imperishable impress upon the civilization of the 
world are the Hebrew and the Anglo-Saxon — the 
one descended through thousands of years from 
a single f amity without admixture, the other 
holding in its veins the choicest extract of the 
best bloods of humanity. A brief review of the 
dominant characteristics of these two great races, 
the Anglo-Saxon and the Hebrew, is not only 
interesting and instructive but is really essen- 
tial to the proper setting of this storj^ 

The island of Britain, separated from the main- 
land of Europe by a narrow strip of sea, with 
excellent soil and tempered climate, was admir- 
ably adapted to breeding a robust population. 
From the fifth to the seventh centuries of the 
Christian era it was occupied and possessed by 
tribes from [N'orthern Europe, Saxons, Angles and 



SOME FAMILY HISTORY. 21 

Jutes, offspring of the strongest race of history. 
This race already had been schooled in courage 
and trained to enterprise by generations of sea- 
faring adventure. They were uncorrupted by 
any mercenary contact with the decaying civ- 
ilization of Kome, but were ready for whatever 
knowledge and religion Eome could give them. 
The Angles in their continental home were es- 
sentially a clean and virile race unpolluted by 
the excesses of Southern Europe. After much 
warring with one another, and with their Dan- 
ish kin, they became fused into a nation of 
Englishmen, and for five centuries lived an 
isolated life— long enough to deeply ingrain a 
strong and independent character. 

These Anglo-Saxons, as they were named, 
were a sturdy and vigorous, though homely and 
unlettered, race. Latest born of the three sis- 
ter races, in the decay of the other two, the Latin 
and the Greek, they conserved the best elements 
of both and brought into the world a new genius 
and gave to civilization a new character. 

They had the idea of liberty of person, checked 
by loyalty to another who was called chief, but 
unchecked by anything else. As pirates and sea- 
robbers they descended on England and found 
the Celtic Briton, originally as warlike as them- 
selves, but now weakened by four or five cen- 



22 A FAMILY QUARREL. 

turies of protection by Eoman soldiers — and 
drove these Britons from the coast of the N'orth 
Sea, and later forced them out into the western 
extremities. The natural affinities of the Anglo- 
Saxons predisposed them toward Christianity. 
Naturally dominated by manly moral instincts, 
religion has changed their native character per- 
haps less than it has changed that of any other 
race. 

In this Anglo-Saxon race we find the founda- 
tions and elements of a high civilization. They 
are slower, but sounder; less careful of what is 
agreeable and elegant/ but more solidly based 
upon what is true and just. "It was no accident 
that the great Reformation of the sixteenth cen- 
tury originated among a Teutonic, rather than 
a Latin people. It was the fire of liberty burning 
in the Saxon heart that flamed up against the 
absolutism of the Pope." It is one of the simp- 
lest facts of history that where the Teutonic blood 
is purest there the principles of liberty and de- 
mocracy spread most rapidly. The love of lib- 
erty early ran strong in the German blood, but 
it remained for the Saxon to fully recognize the 
right of the individual to himself, and to plant 
that rock formally as the cornerstone of govern- 
ment. 

In everything, even in his rude and barbarous 



SOME FAMILY HISTORY. 



instincts, the Saxon was always a man. His pre- 
dominant temperamental quality was a manly in- 
dependence. Each in his own home, on his land 
or in his hut, was his own master, upright, free 
and brave. The coward he buried in mud under 
a hurdle. The adulterer he punished with death. 
The adulteress was compelled to hang herself or 
was stabbed to death by her companions. He be- 
lieved there was something sacred in woman. 
He married one and was faithful to her. His 
regard for woman was based on her as a partner 
in the home rather than as a sweetheart before 
marriage. Independence and free air were his 
two prime essentials. While he had no mind for 
mild pleasures and craved violent excitement, yet 
he spurned voluptuousness and was severe in his 
manners and education. His rusty faculties 
could not, perhaps, follow clear lines of poetic 
imagery, yet he did catch glimpses, even in his 
rude and troubled dreams, of the sublime— not 
seeing it perhaps, but feeling it in primitive sim- 
plicity. He was not an idolater in the gross 
sense of that word. True, he had his gods, but 
he did not ''bow down to wood and stone." He 
possessed a strong sense of that mysterious in- 
finity which "reverence alone can feel.'' 

The Danes, another branch of this same race, 
about the end of the eighth century poured south- 



24 A FAMILY QUARREL. 

ward out of their bleak and barren regions, and 
for two hundred years the Black Eaven was 
the scourge and terror of the Saxon homes and 
Kings of England. They were a fierce and pirat- 
ical race. The boast of their sea-kings was that 
"they had never slept under smoky rafters." 
Their code of honor was, "A brave man ought to 
attack two; stand firm against three; may give 
ground a little to four, and ought to retreat only 
from five." They believed in immortality — 
rather a sanguinary immortality, to be sure — 
where in Valhalla they would hew each other 
forever in bloodless conflict and drink their ale 
from cups of hollowed skulls. 

With no territory but the waves, and no dwell- 
ings but their stout two-sailed ships, they laughed 
at the storm while they lustily sang, 

"The blast of the tempest aids our oars." 

But they were more than pirates, they were 
bold and daring navigators and discoverers and 
colonizers. Passing up the Humber and Trent 
rivers, they made this part of England especially 
theirs, a district which became famous as ''The 
Pilgrim Country," with Auster field as the upper 
limit and East Eetford and Worksop as the lower 
right and left respectively. Defiling Christian 
churches seems to have been a favorite pastime 



SOME FAMILY HISTORY. 



25 



with these Danish invaders. If caught in this 
vandalism they were flayed alive and their skins 
nailed to the doors of the churches. Bits of 
human skin found under the old nail-heads of 
the heavy oaken church-doors have been depos- 
ited in the British Museum. 

Slaying the priests at the altars, and using 
books as kindling to bum the monasteries, they 
sought to sweep at once both letters and religion 
from the earth. And they well nigh succeeded, 
for the light of intelligence was almost extin- 
guished and Saxon England was brought down 
almost to its primitive barbarism. They be- 
queathed a distinct physical type and left the im- 
press of their influence on the Saxon language 
and on the Saxon manners— an influence not yet 
effaced. The stains of their primitive paganism 
have never been bleached out altogether. It was 
from these sea-wolves who lived on the pillage of 
the world, the English derived the larger part 
of their maritime enterprise and military pres- 
tige. It was the large admixture of that old 
Danish fierce fighting blood in American veins 
that won American liberties in the seventies of 
the eighteenth century and preserved them un- 
sullied in their integrity before the world in 
the sixties of the nineteenth century; and while 
the same proportion of that old blood continues 



26 A FAMILY QUARREL. 

to circulate in the American system, friends and 
foes alike may dismiss all anxiety as to the ability 
of Americans to take care of themselves. 

Into this homely and vigorous Saxon stock was 
grafted the chivalry and splendor and pride of 
the Normans, a Scandinavian tribe with a changed 
nature — Christianized in the medieval sense, and 
civilized. It was a race full of strange contradic- 
tions, — poetic, brave, adventurous. They were 
originally of Saxon stock, but their blood had 
been warmed and their wit quickened by Latin 
and Gallic influences in the country of the Franks. 
In after centuries they contributed to Saxon Eng- 
land her great scholars and statesmen, and to 
Europe the very flower of her chivalry. In re- 
finement of manners, in artistic taste of pleasing, 
in war-like enterprises and in improved weapons 
of warfare as well as in intellectual culture, they 
were superior to the Anglo-Saxon, and the com- 
mingling of their blood contributed new impulses 
and higher ideals to the national character. Long 
before the Norman had left his Northern home 
he had been brought into contact with those great 
reservoirs of civilization to which modern Europe 
owes so much. 

"The peculiar quality of his genius was its 
suppleness,'^ says a modern author. "He was po- 



SOME FAMILY HISTORY. 27 

lite, elegant, graceful, talkative, dainty, super- 
ficial. Beauty pleased, rather than exalted him. 
Nature was pretty, rather than grand, never mys- 
tical. Love was a pastime rather than a de- 
votion. Woman impressed him less by any spirit- 
ual transcendance than by a ^vastly becoming 
smile,' a ^sweet and perfumed breath,' a form 
'white as new-fallen snow upon a branch.' " He 
studied to display his skill and courage "for the 
meed of glory," and to "win the applause of the 
ladies by magnificence in dress and armor." It 
is this same spirit in his American Saxon de- 
scendants that finds vent on Fourth of July and 
other hip-hip-hurrah occasions — all of which 
however are but exuberant frills upon a truly 
great and splendid character. 

The Normans intermarried with the French, 
borrowed largely from French manners and cus- 
toms which they imported into England, and they 
introduced into Saxon speech at least a third part 
of its words. Like the Danes, they were born 
sailors. They became the leading race in North- 
ern Europe and gave to England the greater 
23art of her mercantile greatness. And Norman 
blood, though widely diffused and greatly en- 
ervated by inferior admixtures, has never yet lost 
its natural heroism and love of power. It re- 
quired, if we may judge by the language, about 



28 A FAMILY QUAEBEL. 

three hundred years for the Saxons to absorb 
them with their love of art, their devotion to 
learning and their talent for founding institutions, 
though the Saxons were to them in the propor- 
tion of about forty to one. "On the dividing line 
between the Eoigland of the Normans and the 
England of the English stands Chaucer, almost 
the last beacon-light of foreign influence, and 
the first poet of English speech." 

Such then, are the origins and some of the 
leading characteristics of the ancestors of this 
great Saxon Family — a Family that has vindi- 
cated its capability in great enterprises, has pre- 
served unbroken through the centuries its free 
spirit, and which, in its life and literature, has 
furnished the pioneers of progress and the moral 
and spiritual leaders and teachers of the world. 

Their primitive philosophy was without ab- 
stractions. Their metaphysics overleaped all 
categories. Their history is like tales woven 
from the dreams of giants. Their early litera- 
ture is like pictures reflected from running 
streams. Their later literary genius became capa^ 
ble of combining such remarkable extremes as 
the "myriad-mindedness" of Shakespeare and the 
Puritanism of Milton, the polished graces of 
Addison and the odd follies of Swift, the soli- 
dity of Johnson and the sadness and madness of 



SOME FAMILY HISTORY. 



29 



Byron, the serious philosophy of Browning and 
the entrancing music of Tennyson, the stately 
periods of Macauley and the virile strength of 
Kipling. A voluminous literature that, in prose 
and poetry and science and philosophy and 
sober history and picturesque romance, combines 
in unequaled proportions all the qualities that en- 
ter into a great and permanent literature. 

Their very superstitions were but the tremors 
of the mighty forces pent-up within them and 
clamoring for expression. They needed but the 
wise direction of an intelligent Christian faith 
to develop a moral and intellectual and spiritual 
character unequaled in strength and quality 
among the races of the world. 

What a prophecy for the future of this amal- 
gamated race do these great ideas of civil and 
social justice, and of inherent personal rights, 
which were suspended in the chaos of their un- 
tamed imagination, declare Could any pos- 
sible dream of future greatness and power be 
regarded as extravagant ? We are not surprised, 
therefore, after centuries of education and sub- 
jection to Christian principles, to find that this 
vigorous and virile race has practically accom- 
plished the domination of the world. Though it 
comprises only one fifteenth of the world's popu- 
lation, it nevertheless rules more than one-third 



80 A FAMILY QUARREL. 

of its surface and one-fourth of its inhabitants, 
and is multiplying more rapidly than the com- 
bined races of Continental Europe. 

Perhaps the best representatives of this race 
the world ever saw were those who comprised the 
first settlers of our Country and the founders 
of our Government. It has been well said that 
'*God sifted the races of the Old World for seed 
with which to sow the virgin soil of the New;" 
or, to change the figure, God distilled the com- 
bined bloods of the races of the world, and then 
poured the quintessence of their choicest extract 
into American veins. 

You will appreciate more highly your rich 
American inheritance if you will analyze your 
blood. What a strange medley of racial elements 
it contains! There is Norman blood, hence dig- 
nity and chivalry, art and architecture, sentiment 
and romance. There is Celtic blood, hence wit 
and humor, valor and eloquence. There is Dan- 
ish blood, hence hardihood and love of the sea, 
and a sublime conceit of ability to take care of 
ourselves. There is German blood, hence love 
of order, pertinacity of purpose, high esteem for 
women, love of home and cultivation of the soil 
and love of native land and reverence for re- 
ligion and law. And if there be any other blood 
containing elements of greatness, that blood will 



SOME FAMILY HISTORY. 31 

doubtless be found to account for any other 
Anglo-Saxon American virtues not otherwise ac- 
counted for — all combining to form a positively 
new race, — a race inheriting the distinctive pe- 
culiarities of the best of the Teutonic, Celtic, and 
Roman tribes of Europe — a race destined, as we 
believe, to the sovereignty of the world. 

They love colonization and conquest. Judge 
Story says they excel all others in pushing their 
way out into new territory. They are the 
world's pioneers in the best sense of the word. 
Charles Dickens was reported to have said while 
in this country, that the typical American would 
hesitate to enter Heaven, unless assured that if 
he ever desired to do so he might go farther west. 
This statement has had a remarkable exemplifi- 
cation in our recent history. We have gone so 
far ''west" we have gotten clear round into the 
''East." For America there is no longer any 
west. As some wag remarked: "On American 
territory the sun never sets, — and no other na- 
tion ever sits. ' ' 



HEBREW IDEALS AND IDEAS 

Sources of Power 

^'The Schoolmaster of the Nations" 

Historical Recogi^tion 

Supreme Gifts 

The Four Baptisms 

A Combination op Ideas and Brains 
AND Blood 



HEBREW IDEALS AND IDEAS. 35 

^nT But whence came these elements of 
^1 1 1 greatness in this Anglo-Saxon race ? And 
^1 1 whence the great ideas of civil and per- 
sonal rights and the equality of all men before 
the law? And whence the application of the 
law of retribution for the wicked and of reward 
for the righteous to the conduct of societies and 
of states? The historical as well as the moral 
answer to these questions is, The Hebrew Race. 
And who shall say if the work of this great He- 
brew race be finished? There be those who de- 
clare its work is done, and that for the future 
their Prophets and writings may be rated with 
the authors and literature of Egypt and India. 
But no race can be considered dead so long as the 
principles which actuated it live among the na- 
tions. No speech is dead while it is vocal with 
living ideas. The Greek will never die, because 
his is the language of poetry and philosophy and 
eloquence. Rome survives in the barbaric hordes 
that swept over the Continent absorbing the con- 
querors, giving them her language and largely 
shaping their institutions. 

This Hebrew race, strong and virile and ever 
loyal to the traditions, high and ancient, of their 
fathers — this race is not dead. It deserves bet- 
ter things than it has received at the hands of 
history to which it has given many of its most 



36 A FAMILY QUABBEL. 

famous men and many of its most illustrious 
achievements. The contribution it has made to 
the permanent progress of the world has been 
immeasurable. To the shame of history it must 
be confessed that in no instance has similar ser- 
vice met with so little recognition or kindled so 
faint a glow of gratitude. 

We are indebted to this Hebrew race for prac- 
tically all the great moral ideas which underlie 
the entire fabric of our modern American Chris- 
tian civilization. In fact the Hebrew has fur- 
nished the moral and religious reservoir from 
w^hich practically the whole world has draA^^l the 
moral tonic of its daily social life. The force of 
these ideas in the reformatory crises of history 
has been beyond possible human estimate. With- 
out them there could not have been a Luther 
nor a Reformation, a Washington nor an Ameri- 
can Republic. 

No other nation held such a wide and inefface- 
able distinction between right and wrong, or 
clung with, such tenacity and uncompromising 
integrity to the ideas of retribution swift and 
certain for iniquity, and of ultimate blessedness 
for the righteous. These ideas they applied re- 
morselessly to nations and states, teaching that 
there can be no permanent peace or prosperity 
except through perfect obedience to the ]Moral 



HEBREW IDEALS AND IDEAS. 37 

Law. The School-Master of the nations, it has 
ever been the task of the Hebrew to quicken and 
arouse the sleeping conscience of the world and 
prepare the way for liberty. 

These ideas are what gave point and power to 
the preaching of Savonarola and Calvin, awak- 
ened the demand for liberty in the Netherlands 
and in England; constituted the basal rock 
upon which were builded alike the jurisprudence 
and the theology of New England. What 
tongues of fire they gave to Garrison and Phil- 
lips and Sumner and the Beechers in the dis- 
cussions which culminated in the Civil War and 
the emanciptaion of the slave. 

It has been said truly that in the preparation 
of the nations for and in the attainment of a 
purer national life it has ever been the ideas of 
the Hebrew Theocracy that have had the most 
stimulating and unrelenting force. Their great- 
ness in moral conceptions and the thoroughness 
with which their sublime and inspired ideals 
have permeated all the new literatures, particu- 
larly the English and the German, constitute 
the imperishable monuments to their intellectual 
and moral power. Every renewal of literary 
life among the Germans has been accelerated by 
Hebrew ideas. Luther's Bible did for the Ger- 
man language what King James' did for the 



38 A FAMILY QUABEEL. 

English. In all the noblest literary monuments 
of both the English and the German are found 
traces deep and clear, in both language and ideas, 
of the original Hebrew inspiration. Better to 
have given the world this rich inheritance of 
moral motive and moral power than to have 
built the Pyramids or reared the triumphal arch 
of world-empire. 

The Hebrew may not have given the world any 
breathing sculpture, or speaking canvas, nor be- 
queathed to its weary generations any great 
scientific discoveries, but he has given that with- 
out which art and science, literature and philoso- 
phy would be but the poor thin gildings of a cos- 
mopolitan inferno. He has given the human race 
both the historical and the moral basis of Chris- 
tianity, and its spiritual character and ideal, as 
well as its ethical standards. The cheap sneers 
so jauntily perpetrated against the Hebrew 
should be constantly rebuked, and historical 
reverence and recognition ever accorded the great 
race that has given to the Avorld's jurisprudence 
its Moses, to the world's poetry its David, to the 
world's pioneers their Abraham, to the world's 
literature its Isaiah, to the world's ethics its 
Paul, and to the world's religion both its Bible 
and its Christ, for, as Lessing 's friar says, 
"Jesus was himself a Jew." 



HEBEEW IDEALS AND IDEAS. 39 

That old Hebrew Faith was not the mean, 
narrow, shriveled thing that is often mistaken 
for it. True, it was clothed with endless routine, 
and filled with apparently small trivialities and 
laborious formalities, but it was a Faith of cen- 
tral truths and ideal principles. It was a re- 
ligion creative, suggestive, impulsive — as radical 
in its analysis as it was inspiring in its visions. 
Out from it has come, as stream from fountain, 
redeemed individualism as the secret of social 
wealth and progress, and personal integrity as 
the soul of peace and prosperity. Noble and in- 
spiring was that old religion ! In its Ideal lives 
the secret of all social progress in the past and 
the potency of all advancement in the future. It 
was the great good fortune of this young Family 
to receive four distinct baptisms of vision and 
power from it. 

The first baptism came in the person of Chris- 
tian soldiers sent by the Empire to the Celtic 
Britains to hold this important out-post. There 
were probably many Centurions, other than those 
named in the New Testament, who were happy 
in bowing before the Jewish teaching of a Su- 
preme Kuler. This first contact with this great 
Faith was prior to the fifth century. This Chris- 
tian teaching was crushed by the Saxon invasion 
in England but survived in Ireland. Fi'om 



40 A FAMILY QUAEKEL. 

thence came missionaries in the seventh century 
to evangelize Northern England, as St. Augustin 
a few years before had done in Kent. This was 
the second baptism of Hebrew and Christian 
ideas. Again the Christian teaching was crushed 
out by the barbarian in the Danish invasion of the 
ninth and tenth centuries in all save in Wessex 
and in Kent. The third great baptism came 
with the Normans in the eleventh centu^3^ They 
brought with them scholars and priests and built 
churches and monasteries. The fourth and great- 
est of all these baptisms came in the Reformation, 
beginning with the teachings of Wycliffe and the 
Lollards, and culminating in the separation of 
the English church from Rome in the sixteenth 
century. It was the greatest because the way 
had been prepared for it by the revival of learn- 
ing, and the Greek and Latin classics, and the 
Greek Testament. Probably the civil rulers of 
the day did not realize that in breaking with 
Rome they were aiding the cause of Civil 
Liberty. 

Along with the Jewish teachings, now com- 
pleted by the greatest of all Jews, came Roman 
law and civic philosophy. These two truths, 
where they had a chance, made men free. It 
took time, however. The splendid conception 
of a city of G^ — a redeemed humanity — has not 



HEBREW IDEALS AND IDEAS. 



41 



even yet emerged a veritable and luminous 
fact among men. But the teachers and the 
poets of the ages have kept the vision fresh and 
alive in the hearts of men, and have helped tre- 
mendously from age to age to shape human in- 
stitutions so that they would help toward its 
realization; and here in America we have ap- 
proached a little nearer to it than has been ac- 
complished anywhere else on earth. And this 
splendid family, in the eager flush of its buoyant 
youth has its face set steadily toward it. Heaven 
has favored them with such an equipment for 
its consummation as has been given no other 
race or nation. 

Hebrew ideas and Anglo-Saxon blood and 
brain, genius and enterprise, are the main fac- 
tors of our American Christian Civilization. The 
materials out of which the keel and ribs of our 
mighty Ship of State were constructed were 
rescued from a rush-basket floating among the 
flags of the river Nile. Talk about your mighty 
ships that plough the briny deeps, carrying 
their precious cargoes of human treasure and 
human life ! That little rush-basket ship carried 
the concentrated extract of the world's religion 
and law and civilization for four thousand years. 
It was well worth the welcome of a Princess 
Royal at its landing. 



THE EOMA:NrCE BEGINS. 

From Holland to England 

A Family op Wealth and Distinction 

Reversal op Family Fortunes 

A Fair Maiden With Progressive Ideas 

The Inevitable Young Man With 
Revolutionary Notions 

''Love at First Sight" 



^ 



THE ROMANCE BEGINS. 45 

And now the real romance of the stoiy 

begins. 

Under the dreadful persecutions in- 
spired and led throughout their lives by Philip 
II and the Duke of Alva — a persecution cover- 
ing eighty years — about one hundred thousand 
Hollanders crossed the channel and made 
their homes in the eastern and southern counties 
of England. They came from a land of public 
schools and universities. Each man brought his 
Bible Avhich he could read for himself and for his 
neighbor. They were industrious, self-support- 
ing men, scholars, manufacturers, bankers, mer- 
chants, all of them freemen and refugees for 
freedom's sake and for conscience sake. They 
were men, brave men, grand men, men construct- 
ed out of the very prodigality of nature, massive 
in intellect and in soul. Perhaps never in the 
history of the world was there a missionary move- 
ment on so grand a scale. They were capable of 
teaching the people among whom they settled, 
commerce, agriculture, banking, the trades, re- 
publican politics, and above all, the true religion. 
Their daily life was a daily sermon on Christian 
virtue and temperance and chastity. 

It was out of these counties, into which the 
Dutch came from Holland, that Cambridge had 
arisen, that educational centre of broad scien- 



46 A FAMILY QUABBEL. 

tific thought and Puritanism, which gave 
America the first scholars and leaders of New 
England. Out of these counties the English 
Commonwealth sprung, and Cromwell sprung, 
and from them Cromwell's army was mustered, 
and the famous *'01d Ironsides." Above all, 
it was from this region, impressed by Dutch 
ideas and imbued with Dutch principles, and 
filled, through intermarriage, with Dutch blood 
that the great exodus to America came — the 
Pilgrim exodus which made New England what 
it has been. From these counties came the 
church of John Robinson from Scrooby, tarry- 
ing a while in Holland, and then coming to 
Plymouth as the Pilgrim Fathers. 

At the time of this great exodus from Hol- 
land to England there lived in Holland many 
families of great wealth. They were the Rocke- 
fellers and Carnegies of their time, while in 
political influence they far surpassed any of the 
rich men of the present. Among these, and 
one of the most wealthy and influential, was a 
family which had its headquarters in Augs- 
burg, and a powerful branch of the family in 
Antwerp. Some of the members of the Ant- 
werp branch of the family found their way into 
England at the time of which we are writing. 
It ought to be said of this particular Augs- 



THE EOMANCE BEGINS. 47 

burg family that they were liberal patrons of 
art and literature, having their houses filled 
with rare paintings and costly books. They sup- 
ported musicians and artists, and founded hos- 
pitals and schools and charitable institutions al- 
most without number. The foundation of the 
wealth of this family was laid in the honorable 
trade of linen weaving and the commerce per- 
taining thereto. It is told of the founder of 
the family that on one occasion when Emperor 
Charles V. was viewing the royal treasures at 
Paris he exclaimed, "there is a linen weaver at 
Augsburg who could pay as much as this with 
his own gold.'' x\nd of him another story is 
related that, receiving a visit from the emperor 
on one occasion, he heated the halls of his 
princely dwelling with cinnamon-wood, and 
kindled the fires with bonds for an immense 
sum, representing money borrowed from him 
by his royal guest. That kind of hospitality 
would be calculated to warm the heart of any 
debtor-guest who might be permitted to enjoy it. 
The Antwerp branch of this family in Eng- 
land intermarried with the English aristocracy 
and royalists of the most pronounced type. For 
a long time they were prosperous and influen- 
tial, but the Holland blood in their veins re- 
sponded with alarming cordiality to strangely 



48 A FAMILY QUABEEL. 

revolutionary doctrines which began to be 
preached. Meanwhile the family fortunes had 
somewhat changed. With the terrific exactions 
of the English crown, trade suffered and com- 
merce was for a time well nigh paralyzed. 
These Hollanders had not forgotten the tra- 
ditions and freedom of their old home. The 
University of Leyden, where their fathers had 
been educated, had been erected to celebrate 
the raising of the siege by the Spaniards. The 
first act of the relieved people had been to as- 
semble in their churches and on bended knees 
give thanks to God for their deliverance. The 
men assembled in the churches on that day were 
the fathers of the men who thirty-five years later 
opened their homes and hearts to the exiled Pil- 
grim Fathers. 

In course of time there was born into the 
home of an Englishman, whose wife was in di- 
rect descent from this noted Antwerp family, a 
baby girl. She was proudly christened Federal 
Union by her parents. This little girl grew up 
into womanhood amid stirring times in which 
the greatest civil and religious questions that 
ever disturbed and inspired any age were being 
freely discussed. The maiden was full of 
energy, and surcharged in every faculty of body 
and of soul with the love of liberty — an inheri- 



THE BOMANCE BEGINS. 49 

tance from her Holland mother. It was with 
difficulty, indeed, that she was able to maintain 
her proper place in English society, since her 
decidedly liberal ideas, which she made no ef- 
fort to disguise or conceal, were the scandal of 
her times. She obtained her education in the 
times of Elizabeth, a period in which the in- 
creased sense of individual power foimd its ex- 
pression in the new spirit which was already 
beginning definitely to distinguish England from 
other nations. And yet this maiden, by virtue 
of her father's position, and with true feminine 
self-contradictoriness, was an intense Royalist 
and a Cavalier of the most aristocratic station. 
She was an ardent supporter of the claims of 
the Established Church and a staunch champion 
of the rights of the crown. But the ideas in- 
herited from her Holland mother were destined 
to have their moulding influences in her after 
life, particularly that part of it which was re- 
lated to the founding of her new home in the 
New World. She was not the only maiden who 
had felt the strange contradiction between the 
position thrust upon her by the accident of birth 
and the great convictions which were to make or 
mar her whole life, and the lives of unborn mil- 
lions. She faced the tremendous responsibility 
without flinching, and determined her course 
according to the Will of Heaven. 



so A FAMILY QUAEBEL. 

Just at this point the inevitable young man ap- 
pears. How he always manages to be on the 
ground at the crisal hour no philosophy of man 
has ever yet determined, but he is there, just 
the same. In this ease it happened to be a 
strapping young Englishman, in whose veins 
flowed the ancient blood of the best of the Saxons 
reinforced and vitalized by the choicest extract 
of all the bloods hereinbefore mentioned. He 
was a young man of decidedly revolutionary ideas 
as to both church and civil affairs. In body and 
in spirit he was the inevitable outcome of the 
ages of struggle that conspired to produce 
him. He was not something that happened in 
the world; he seemed to have been born when 
the world was born and to have grown up with 
it. He had' the great good fortune to meet and 
fall in love with this maiden. His name was 
Civil Liberty. 

It was a pure case of "love at first sight," and 
unlike most such sudden passions, it was destined 
to deepen and strengthen with the centuries, sur- 
viving all civil and social upheavals, and all 
shocks of Revolution and Rebellion, and to cul- 
minate ultimately in a shining and perpetual 
example to the whole world of a Union con- 
ceived in liberty and dedicated to the rights of 
mankind and cemented forever by the blessing 
of "the God who made man free." 



SCHOOL DAYS. 

A Post Graduate Course 

"What Will Our Parents SayT' 

Two Famous School Teachers 

"God's Silly Vassal '^ 

A Fatal Blunder 

Back to Holland 

"Intended for Each Other'' 

A Great Inspiration 



SCHOOL DAYS. 53 

^TT These young people met at that most plas- 
flll tic period — the school life. They each 
^1 1 took a post-graduate course at the same 
school, and had for their teachers the two great- 
est teachers then in the world. John Knox, 
whose prayers and sermons shook the thrones of 
kings and queens, had been himself a diligent 
student of John Calvin, whose revolutionaiy 
theology, and whose theories of civil govern- 
ment, and of the rights of the people as against 
the alleged divine rights of the king, were 
making all Christendom tremble in alarm. The 
very foundations of civil and social order were 
being threatened by these two audacious teach- 
ers. Both of these young people had been ab- 
sorbent listeners at their feet. 'Twas here they 
first looked into each other's eyes, and into each 
other's hearts, and life could never again be 
the same for either. Her warm Holland blood 
set her heart all aflutter and her cheeks all 
aflame; while his cooler and more deliberate Pil- 
grim blood, though held in hard restraint, never- 
theless raced like wine through his veins, while 
stammering speech only confused the eternal 
thing he longed to say. It was the greatest hour 
in human history since the dawn of the Christian 
Era. To their confused "What will our parents 
say to this?" good John Knox had the audacity 



54 A FAMILY QUAEBEL. 

to assure them that it would be all right in the 
end, for in affairs of the heart, and as affecting 
the matter of personal choice, young people have 
some rights to think and act for themselves. 

After all, the world's great teachers have con- 
stituted its true nobility. Their story is the story 
of humanity's progress. Than these two, Calvin 
and Knox, few more richly repay the closest 
study. This is particularly true as regards the 
relation of their teachings to the new order that 
was to be established in this !N"ew Home soon to 
be established in the New World. 

John Calvin, the French teacher of Geneva, 
had from a deep study of the Bible, derived a 
special system of doctrine and discipline. The 
heart of his doctrine was: "Let a man believe 
with all his heart the absolute sovereignty of God, 
let him believe that his first and last allegiance 
is to God as sovereign, and he will know no such 
thing as fear of the face of man, be he king or 
potentate or peasant." That was the substance 
of his teaching. That teaching he wrote into 
Swiss Protestantism, into French Huguenotism, 
into English Puritanism, and into New England 
Pilgrimism. Buckle saj^s, "wherever that doc- 
trine has gone in France, Britain, Switzerland, 
America, the Calvinist faith has shown itself the 
unfailing friend of Constitutional Liberty." 



SCHOOL DAYS. 



55 



d' Aubigne says, ''Calvin was the founder of the 
greatest of the Eepublics: the oppressed who 
went to America were the sons of his faith." 
Motley tells us that, "Holland, England and 
America owe their liberties to the Calvinists." 

It was at the feet of Calvin John Knox sat, 
and having mastered his lesson, he took it home 
and set it to service to work out the reformation 
of Scotland. He drove out the Eoman hierarchy 

the natural enemy of republicanism — and gave 

Scotland a free church and a free state, and 
taught the people how to learn their rights, as 
citizens, from the Bible. He showed them how 
to find, in the Bible, those modern American 
doctrines, the principle of representation and 
the right of choice. He gave the people schools 
and education, and molded the men who were 
to shape the New World. 

Knox worked always from within the church, 
believing that to build a free church was to build 
a free people. Carlyle says of him, "He resur- 
rected Scotland from the dead and gave it lit- 
erature and thought and industry. Watt and 
Hume and Scott and Burns— without the Ref- 
ormation these could not have been." But Car- 
lyle was himself a Scotchman. One who is not 
a Scotchmen says of them, "In proportion to 
their small numbers, they are the most distin- 



56 A FAMILY QUABREL. 

guished little people since the days of the Athe- 
nians, and the best educated of the modern 
races." All the industrial arts may be found 
in Glasgow, and all the fine arts in Edinburgh, 
and as for their literature, it is everywhere. We 
shall have more to say of the Scotch people later 
on. 

Now note carefully a series of most interesting 
events. 

On the death of Elizabeth in 1603 James I came 
to the throne of England. History compels the 
estimate: he was a fool. Under his wholly ri- 
diculous exterior, however, lay concealed a man 
of considerable ability in natural shrewdness, 
scholarship, and mother-wit; but he was a cow- 
ard with a big head, a slobbering tongue, rickety 
legs, lack of dignit}-, coarseness of speech, buf- 
foonery and pedantry. A prominent Puritan 
minister once publicly plucked his sleeve and 
addressed him as "God's silly vassal." James 
never forgot the insult nor did he ever forgive 
the Puritans for offering it. 

The Young Englishman, Civil Liberty, had 
imbibed from his great teachers, Calvin and 
Knox, the then novel and wholly revolutionary 
doctrine, that in affairs of the heart, and as 
touching individual life-choices, young people 
have some rights to think and act for them- 



SCHOOL DAYS. ^7 

selves. To the defense of this idea and to its 
everlasting promulgation he now felt called by 
all the devotion he felt for the fair maid, and to 
the gigantic task he set himself with all possible 
zeal, greatly encouraged and strengthened by the 
admiration and devotion of this maiden of his 
heart's desire, Federal Union. It must be said 
right here that, notwithstanding their wide dif- 
ferences in political and religious belief, as well 
as in social position, they loved each other de- 
votedly, and realized fully that only in IJnion 
could their passion for Liberty be satisfied and 
exemplified before the world. As in most such 
affairs, their differences were on the surface, at 
heart they were already one. 

King James, with characteristic blundering, 
failed to note and reckon with the forces which 
were working for political and religious freedom 
among the people of his land. He haughtily de- 
clared that he would have no sentimental non- 
sense about his court. He said: "I will have no 
liberty as to ceremonies; I will have one doc- 
trine, one discipline, one religion, in substance 
and ceremony." If these young upstarts did not 
like that procedure they might make the best 
of it! 

The inevitable happened — as indeed it is likely 
to — in spite of love and deathless devotion. 



58 A FAMILY QUARBEIL. 

Given the choice between imprisonment and exile, 
they sensibly chose the latter, and, accompanied 
by their pastor and practically the entire church, 
they went on a prolonged visit to some mutual 
friends, relatives of Federal Union, in Holland. 
The young man carried with him introductory- 
letters which gave both himself and his beloved 
immediate entrance into the very best homes in 
Holland and to the most loyal and lasting fel- 
lowships they had ever known in their lives, 
or ever were to know. This visit, as we shall 
have occasion to notice later, was to have a 
larger influence on both their lives, as w^ell as 
upon the shaping of the foundations of the 
new home in the New World, than either of 
them at the time even dreamed. A Power, 
mightier than themselves, had gripped the sit- 
uation and was shaping events and generating 
forces toward a great consummation. In Ley- 
den, "the heart of Holland," seat of the great 
university of the name, they met many famous 
people, and were surrounded with an atmosphere 
highly stimulating alike to their mutual devo- 
tion and to the great passion for Liberty and 
Union which was the very breath of their life. 
They were not lonely, and the Pilgrim community 
prospered well, many buying their own homes, 
having their own place of worship, and while 



SCHOOL DATS. 69 

they did not hold their goods in common, they 
did enter into a sacred covenant with each other 
to bear each other's burdens. In their church 
life the unity of the spirit was preserred in the 
bonds of peace. The Pilgrim congregation was 
as "cosmopolitan as Christianity itself.'' Mem- 
bers of the Reformed churches of England, Scot- 
land, France and the Netherlands were received 
into communion. The bond of union in the 
church was not "a creed in a form of words, 
but a covenant of mutual love and service, and 
of loyalty to the Divine Master." They kept 
their eyes open and learned many things which 
were destined to be of great service to them 
later. Robinson, their devoted pastor, "was very 
confident that the Lord had more truth and 
light to break forth out of his holy Word." 

Both Civil Liberty and Federal Union, it will 
be perceived, had deeply imbibed that doctrine so 
peculiarly attractive to all young people at this 
stage in their social history, namely, that they 
were from all eternity intended for each other. 
Only in Union could they realize their sublime 
passion and destiny. Subsequent events have 
abundantly justified that faith, for it was to them, 
not a mere sentiment, but a mighty faith. Love 
was trusted to find a way, and Love, given a free 
hand, seldom disappoints such a trust, certainly 
did not disappoint in this case. 



S9 A FAMILY QUASBEL. 

Even in Holland they were not free from the 
tyrannous persecutions of James Stuart, of Eng- 
land. Some of the Pilgrims had the temerity to 
publish and circulate some pamphlets contain- 
ing doctrines highly offensive to the somewhat 
sensitive political tastes of the King; whereupon 
he set all the resources of his government at 
work to ferret out and punish the offenders. In 
some small measure he succeeded, but you can- 
not exterminate ideas in that way. The mis- 
guided efforts of the King in this matter simply 
drove the advocates of these doctrines to more 
strenuous and determined endeavors. The per- 
secution only served to advertise and spread the 
"offensive notions" more widely. 

One day, while musing on these and other stir- 
ring matters, a great inspiration came to our 
hero. Was it an inspiration from Heaven, or 
was it a mere adventurous notion? He at once 
consulted his Beloved in the matter, and they 
debated the whole question with great serious- 
ness, all the while planning practical ways for 
carrying it into execution. It was a somewhat 
unconventional proceedure they proposed; but 
after the most careful consideration, they de- 
cided to cast the die and stake their all upon 
the throw. 

In the meanwhile some interesting events have 
been happening in the Old Home. 



SOME CORRELATED EVENTS. 

A Ship Load of Old Bachelors 

A Hopeless Enterprise 

A Ship Load of Fair Maidens 

Some Match-Making 

Wedding Fees 

Gloomy Prospects 

Better Than Was Expected 



SOME COESELATED EVENTS. 



f 



Near the time when our young friends 
left England for Holland, some other 
^_ folks had also left. On the twentieth 
day "of December, 1606, three ships carry- 
ing a cargo of about a hundred men dropped 
down the Thames and were blown to their 
destination by contrary winds over rough seas, 
and by a fortunate blunder, "happily condoned 
by Heaven's pity," landed at Jamestown in 
April of the following year. This cargo was 
composed of "gentlemen, gold-refiners, car- 
penters, jewelers, laborers, and one perfumer." 
Eather a nondescript crowd; ten times better 
fitted to spoil a commonwealth than either to 
begin one or help to maintain one. Neither were 
they of a class best calculated to fight the rigors 
of the winter in the wilderness. Their leaders 
were worthless and indolent — the gold-seekers 
were disappointed, and to cap the climax of mis- 
fortune, they had selected a swamp for a dwell- 
ing-place. Hardships almost unimaginable fol- 
lowed. Captain John Smith was the only mas- 
terful man among them. So desperate were their 
straits that the whole colony would most prob- 
ably have perished of starvation but for the 
kindly offices of a dusky Indian Princess, Poca- 
hontas, and her faithful maidens. Since the sur- 
est and shortest way to a man's heart is through 



64 A FAMILY QUAEREL. 

his stomach, it is not remarkahle that the kind- 
hearted Indian Protectress won the lasting de- 
votion of the adventurous settlers and became 
the Patron Saint of the colony. 

Some, however, think there is a deeper reason 
than mere physical hardships for the unfortunate 
history of this Jamestown enterprise so long 
trembling on the brink of utter extinction. Some 
allege that the chief trouble was that they were 
all bachelors. A colony of bachelors has never 
been known to do anything worth while, or to 
have made a success of any enterprise. At least 
history has never thought worth while to record 
anything they ever did for the good of the world. 
Very early in the history of the human race the 
bachelor was pronounced a failure, God hastening 
to create a wife for him. It is about all society 
can do to get along with a few of them — and 
the fewer the better — scattered sparsely through 
it. This somewhat precarious settlement was 
the first permanent English settlement in the 
New World. 

Eealizing the original mistake in trying to 
do anything worth while by a lot of old bachelors, 
about twelve years later another ship bearing 
about a hundred women, among them some of 
England's fairest maidens, landed at Jamestown. 
Both historians and novelists have tried, but all 



SOME COBBELATED EVENTS. 65 

in vain, to describe that situation. Each of these 
women had come across the sea with the avowed 
purpose of entering matrimony and setting up 
homes in the colony. Within twenty-four hours 
after the landing every one of the women was 
married, and the parson's purse was bulging with 
a snug fortune, while his barn was packed with 
enough tobacco — the only coin in which some 
could pay the wedding fee — to supply him for 
the remainder of his life, and of many gener- 
ations following. From that day the colony pros- 
pered, as was to be expected. The enterprise 
proved such a pronounced success, and the letters 
home, written by the happy brides, were so en- 
thusiastic that another ship containing about 
sixty women was sent out, and favoring winds 
brought it also into the desired haven. 

These men and maidens, and the thousands 
more who came after Cromwell beheaded Charles 
I., were Cavaliers and intense Royalists. So 
intense were their Royalist sympathies that Gov- 
ernor Berkeley, while he was governor of the 
colony, secured legislation that treated as traitors 
all who in any way justified the King's death. 
Under the direction of this same Governor, 
Richard Lee, a rich planter, visited Charles II. 
in his exile and offered him Virginia as a king- 
dom if he would but come and accept it. The 



66 A FAMILY QUABBEL. 

offer was not accepted, but the King never for- 
got the kindness of the proffer and on the day of 
his coronation in England, he robed himself in 
Virginia silk. 

There would seem to be little hope for the 
Young Republic among people with such views 
and antecedents. Yet it was the lineal descen- 
dants of these same Cromwell-hating Cavaliers, 
and bitter Royalists, who gave to America many 
of the men and of the measures which made Amer- 
ican liberties popular and effective. It was a direct 
descendant of the same Colonel Lee who offered 
Virginia as a Kingdom to Charles II., who wrote 
the famous Address To The Colonies, and in the 
Continental Congress moved the Declaration of 
Independence in the immortal "RESOLVED, 
That these Colonies are and ought to be free 
and independent States, that all political connec- 
tion between them and the State of Great Britain 
is, and of right ought to be, totally dis- 
solved. ' ' 

The Virginia Colony was patterned after the 
superb baronial establishments of the Mother 
Country, having as the highest type of citizens 
a cheap and crude imitation of the English ter- 
ritorial lord. This ambition toward landed pro- 
prietorship was greatly stimulated by the ease 
with which great tracts of land could be ob- 



SOME COBBEXATED EVENTS. 67 

tained. But this colony in after years was sub- 
ject to such a change of heart and manners as 
made her one of the richest and most self-sacrific- 
ing contributors toward setting up in the New 
World the New Home for Liberty. 

That "Old Dominion/' settled by rank Eoyal- 
ists and aristocratic, ease-loving Cavaliers, uttered 
the first public voice against tyranny of the 
Mother Land, and made the first organized move 
for political National Independence. She also 
gave the first, and the only, commander-in-chief 
of the Continental Army, furnished the father of 
the Constitution of the United States, as well as 
the president of the Constitutional Convention, 
the first President of the United States, and the 
first Chief Justice of the Nation. The Virginia 
Colony did much to make effective the measures 
which gave Federal unity and coherence to the 
young Nation. It was a Virginian who prepared 
the bans which proclaimed the approaching mar- 
riage of our young friends. Good soil it must 
have been to grow such products. 



«A MANUFACTURED COUNTRY'* 

A Place of Refuge 
What Was The '' Vision T' 

An Historic Voyage 

The Mayflower Contract 

A '*Weak Thing" Becomes Mighty 

Some Old College Friends 

Busy Toilers and Patient Suffei^rs 

Inexcusable Intolerance 

Their First ** Lover's Quarrel" 

Temporary Separation 

Another New Enterprise 

Differing Opinions But Unshaken Loyalty 

Led In Strange Ways 



"a manufactubed country." 71 

^nTIn the meanwhile, what has become of our 
^■11 young friends over in Holland? In Caes- 
^1 1 ar's time Holland was a series of marshes 
verging on the Northern Sea. It was a land 
which nature seemed to have denied nearly all her 
gifts, so that disinherited at her birth, she stands 
forth a vast monument to the courage and indus- 
try of an indomitable people. On this little patch 
of "manufactured^' earth the boast of Archimedes 
had been fulfilled. By a matchless industry, that 
uninhabited, and apparently uninhabitable land 
had been converted from a waste into one of the 
most fertile gardens of Europe. Under the lead- 
ership of William the Silent, Prince of Orange, 
a man of splendid genius, of catholicity of spirit 
rarely equaled, and a breadth of view surpassed 
only by his breadth of patriotism, the Nether- 
lands, as the region was then called, had become 
free. Not only free, but at the time under con- 
sideration, had become the refuge for the per- 
secuted Pilgrims and Puritans of England, as well 
as of the Huguenots and all others seeking free- 
dom of conscience and faith. 

When our young English friends, Civil Liberty 
and Federal Union, entered Holland, they found 
a system of confederated states, a free common- 
wealth aHve with the mighty new spirit of enter- 
prise and commerce and letters and refinement. 



72 A FAMILY QUARREL. 

These confederated states had built up and nur- 
tured free institutions for three hundred years, 
while the night of despotism lay thick and heavy 
on all the surrounding horizon. Here they re- 
mained about twelve years, drinking constantly at 
the pure fountains of freedom, making some very 
agreeable acquaintances among English Pilgrims, 
Puritans, and French refugees called Huguenots. 
These twelve years exerted a most salutary in- 
fluence upon the young couple, taking the bigotry 
out of them, teaching them lasting lessons in 
toleration and even Christian love for those who 
were sincere in faiths other than their own. We 
left them some pages back debating agitatedly over 
a great vision or dream that had come to the young 
man. ^Vhat was that vision? Somewhat hazy re- 
ports had been coming to them concerning the 
great New World "beyond the deep sea-wall." 
The vision was this: Where so good a place to 
build the future New Home as in the free and 
unoccupied New World? Yonder in the far dis- 
tance loomed the vast continental estate, to be 
had for the mere occupancy of it. Prom its dis- 
tant, misty shores strange influences seemed to 
draw. They impelled like the lure of heaven. 
The whole matter was freely and fully discussed by 
the community and the decision was reached. Ac- 
cordingly one hundred and two persons under the 



"a manufactubed country." 73 

leadership of William Bradford, William Brewster 
and Miles Standish sailed in the historic May- 
flower for the New Home in the New World, land- 
ing at Plymouth Rock just in time to celebrate 
Christmas, 1630, after a stormy voyage of two 
months. Before landing the men in the com- 
pany drew up and signed the famous "May- 
flower Contract,'' by which they bound themselves 
to make and obey their own laws. The colony re- 
ceived the name of "The "Plymouth Plantation," 
and its founders are commonly known as "The Pil- 
grim Fathers." 

Let no uninformed person imagine that this 
somewhat hasty departure from Holland had in it 
anything of flippant thoughtlessness or of reckless 
adventure. It was accomplished in the spirit of 
devout reverence. It might be called an act of 
real worship. At Delft their minister and some 
close friends accompanied them to the boat. 
God's favor was fervently invoked on the voyage 
and on all who might enter the great wilderness 
to which these Pilgrims were bound. 

What a poor, weak thing that voyage seemed to 
be. But, as Carlyle tells us, "the weak thing be- 
came mighty because it was the true thing." "Pur- 
itanism was only despicable and laughable then; 
but nobody laughs at it now. It has weapons and 
sinews. It has armed navies and has cunning in 



74 A FAMILY QUABBEL. 

its fingers, and strength in its right arm. It can 
steer ships and fell forests and remove mountains. 
It is one of the strongest things under the sun to- 
day. Give a thing time; if it can succeed it is 
a right thing.^^ Puritanism has had time and has 
succeeded. There were straggling settlers along 
the coast of America before — some materials for 
a body — ^the arrival of the Pilgrims and the Puri- 
tans put a soul into it. 

On their arrival, our young friends found some 
old, true friends, and in the years that followed 
they made some very congenial new ones. They 
found, scattered along the coast, many alumni of 
the old Calvin and Knox University from which 
they had both graduated with such distinguished 
honors. They found the Puritans on Massachu- 
setts Bay. The Hollanders, with characteristic 
enterprise, had bought the whole of Manhattan 
Island for the munificent sum of $24, probably all 
it was worth at that time. They found the Quakers 
in Pennsylvania, with some Hollanders in the 
western part of the state. The Covenanters and 
a large proportion of Huguenots in the Caro- 
linas and in all the other settlements. There was 
amid such associations and surroundings, neither 
the disposition nor the provocation to home-sick- 
ness or loneliness. They had each other and 
they had their love, and in spite of many physical 



"a manufactured country." 75 

hardships they were happier than they had ever 
been before. 

For a long while the vigorous young English 
Pilgrim was about the busiest man on the con- 
tinent. He was building his churches and school 
houses and cabins. He was clearing the forests 
for the needed harvests. He was kept constantly 
on guard against the Indians, guiding his plow 
with one hand and clutching his ever needed 
musket with the other. The proverbial wolf had 
to be driven daily from the cabin door. Such was 
the suffering that during the first winter half the 
colony perished. At one time there were but 
six or seven persons able to be about. But to 
their everlasting praise let it be said, notwith- 
standing this terrible suffering, not one of them 
thought of returning to England or to Holland. 
They cheerfully accepted full responsibility for 
the irrevocable step they had taken and were 
ready to stand by the issue to the death, if need 
be. 

Although these Pilgrims and Puritans came to 
America to find civil and religious liberty, they 
refused to allow to others the rights they de- 
manded for themselves. Instead of allowing free- 
dom to all men, they passed severe laws against 
Episcopalians, Eoman Catholics and Quakers. 
They established a state church, and no one was 



76 A FAMILY QUARBEL. 

allowed to vote in a civil election who did not 
belong to this church. Non-attendance at re- 
ligious service was punished by fine, imprison- 
ment or public whipping. **The result was that 
while public order was good and morality high, 
Massachusetts was the most intolerant colony in 
all America." 

There were some who thought, we think with 
good reason, that it was unjust to refuse a man 
participation in civil affairs because he was not 
a member of a certain church. Those who so 
thought moved into Connecticut and founded the 
towns of Windsor, Wethersfield and Hartford. 
These three towns were later united in a mini- 
ature republic under a written constitution, which 
remained in force one hundred and eighty years. 
Connecticut thus became the first republic in the 
history of the world to be founded by a written 
constitution. The influence of this document 
upon the Constitution of the United States is not 
equaled by any other colonial instrument. 

Among those who founded Connecticut was 
the heroine of our story, Federal Union. She 
was, indeed, one of the prime movers in the 
"model enterprise." The first "lover's quarrel" 
was thus provoked. She had some very decided 
views on the questions involved, which views 



"a MAinJFACTUBED CX)UNTBY." 77 

she was no way backward in defending. She 
stoutly resisted all her Lover's appeals, and reso- 
lutely cast in her fortunes with the Connecticut 
colony. 

Communication between distant neighbors was 
exceedingly difficult in those days because of 
lack of facilities for travel. So it happened that 
the young Pilgrim and his sweetheart saw each 
other only at long intervals. Their differences of 
opinion in matters of church and state made no 
difference whatever in their mutual devotion. 
She was a very proud, very haughty, but withal, 
a very beautiful and very true and loving and 
altogether- worth-while young woman. The sepa- 
ration strengthened rather than weakened the 
tie between them. The fires of devotion never 
went down in his heart. Each hardship suffered 
but lent a warmer pulse to his loyal heart, while 
it painted a redder flush upon her cheek and 
lent a quicker throb to her love. They were 
being led in strange ways, truly. But subsequent 
events have shown that no more important event 
occurred in their pre-nuptial history than this 
temporary separation. 

All the while affairs were shaping themselves 
back at the Old Home, as well as in the New, pre- 
paring the way for Union. While they are thus 



78 A FAMILY QUABBEL. 

busy about many prosaic and incidental things, 
seeing little of each other, but loyal, both of 
them, to the heart's core, let us take a suryey of 
the great forces that for centuries have been 
working toward this very imminent consumma- 
tion. 



"TEUE MARRIAGES MADE IN HEAVEN" 

Some Mutual Friends 

The Movement Both Political and Moral 

The Reformers Before The Reformation 

''The White Knisht'' 

''The Luther of Italy'' 

"The Modern Athens'' 

A Popular Preacher 

A Great Explorer 

"New Bottles For New Wine" 



"true marriages made in heaven." 81 

^TT It has passed into a proverb that true mar- 
^■ll riages are made in Heaven. The popular 
^1 1 intei-pretation of this oft-quoted saying is 
supposed to be that some higher power shapes 
circumstances and events so as to bring into con- 
junction just at the proper time just the proper 
persons, and in a way to promote best a happy 
consummation. Let us examine now to what ex- 
tent this is true of the ease under consideration. 
Was this conjunction of Civil Liberty and Fed- 
eral Union in the New World a mere affair of 
chance, or did some higher power so direct events 
as to make it inevitable? Was it a mere acci- 
dent that while Savonarola was in his pulpit in 
Florence, outlining the plan of the Christian 
Commonwealth, whose Sovereign was God and 
whose one law was His Word; Columbus should 
be pushing the prow of his ship out through un- 
charted and unknown seas in search of a New 
Continent upon which this New Commonwealth 
might be securely established? The effort to an- 
swer this question will bring us face to face with 
a double series of connected facts which look 
more like the well laid plot of a masterpiece of 
fiction than like actual, prosaic history. Let us 
examine for a while the historical sequence of 
these facts. 

The great Riritan Movement was as much a 
6 



S2 A FAMILY QUABBEL. 

political as it was a religious, or moral, move- 
ment. It is with two sets of facts, political and 
intellectual, and moral and religious, which we 
have to do here. 

If we are deeply indebted to the men who made 
the Reformation a fact, we are no less indebted 
to the Reformers before the Reformation, the 
men but for whose labors the Reformation might 
not have been possible. It is no exaggeration to 
say that among the pioneers who prepared the 
way for the Reformation, John Wyclif stands 
lofty and alone. N'o greater name in the list of 
English reformers has appeared. His task was 
to sow the seeds both in England and in Ger- 
many which ripened into the Reformation harvest. 
He has been characterized aptly as "The Morn- 
ing Star" of the Reformation, antedating the 
so-called Protestant Reformation by about one 
hundred and fifty years. While Wyclif was writ- 
ing at Oxford, his books were being read in 
Bohemia as well as in England. Huss and Je- 
rome of Prague, both of whom wore the crown 
of martyrdom, were Wyclif's successors. Out of 
WycliFs movement arose the Lollard insurrection 
in England and the Hussite wars in Bohemia. 
For neither of these outbreaks, however, did 
Wyclif deserve the responsibility which most his- 
torians place upon him. The movement was 



"TBUE marriages made in HEAVEN". o6 

carried into Bohemia by the interchange of stu- 
dents between Oxford and The University of 
Prague. The one lasting monument to Wyclif, 
the "White Knight of the Keformation," is his 
first English translation of the entire Bible. Af- 
ter his death his writings were condemned by the 
council of Constance, 1415, and a decree issued 
ordering that all his books, and his body, should 
be publicly burned. Thirteen years after the 
passage of the decree it was peremptorily ordered 
to be carried out by the Pope, the Bishop of 
Lincoln, once a loyal follower of Wyclif, being 
appointed the instrument for its execution. The 
ashes of books and body were collected and cast 
into the river Swift, a tributary to the Avon. 
But they could not bum nor drown the ideas 
which the brave, but premature, Eeformer had 
let loose throughout civilized Europe ; hence the 
prophecy : 

"The Avon to the Severn runs, 

The Severn to the sea; 
And far as ocean throws her waves 
On lands of chapels and of graves 
Shall Wyclif s doctrine be." 

To which may be added Wordsworth's charac- 
terization : 



84 A FAMILY QUABREL. 

"This deed accursed. 
An emblem yields to friends and enemies, 
How the bold teacher's doctrine, sanctified 
By truth, shall spread throughout the world 
dispersed." 

Three quarters of a century after the burning 
of Wyclif's body and books before his church 
at Lutterworth, some students from Oxford went 
to Italy to continue and complete their studies 
in the Greek and Latin classics. Florence was 
at that time the headquarters of the Rennais- 
sance. Here Savonarola was in the full flush of 
his fame and power. He has been called "The 
Luther of Italy.'' He was a man so pure of 
life, so honest and brave and independent, so 
eloquent in speech and so profound in scholar- 
ship, that he seemed gifted with more than 
mortal authority in his utterances. It was as 
though one of the old Hebrew prophets had risen 
from the dead and appeared with fresh authority 
from the King of the Heavens. Florence was 
one of the richest, perhaps the richest city in 
Southern Europe. It was filled with books, poets, 
painters, scholars, and was perhaps the most 
intellectual city in Southern Europe. It was 
certainly one of the most wicked cities of all 
Europe. With the decline of the Florentine Re- 



"tbue mabriages made in heaven." 85 

public had come troublous times; and there had 
come into power certain prominent wealthy fam- 
ilies who assumed the not altogether benevolent 
authority of dictators. Among these was the 
Medici family. The city of Florence became "the 
Modem Athens.^^ While Lorenzo de Medici was 
dictator, he heard of the fame of this priest and 
invited him to Florence, where in due time he 
became prior of San Marco. There had been 
reformers before, but this was a different kind of 
a reformer. Savonarola was a religious reformer 
— a sort of Elijah and John Baptist combined. 
* * He came like a shell in the midst of tinder, and 
it burst in the midst of the Platonic Academy." 
His popularity was astounding. He drew all 
classes, the rich and the cultured and the poor 
and the uncultured. The people of thought and 
fashion attended his ministry. The city was 
shaken as with earthquake throes. The church 
could not hold his audiences and he had to go 
out into the open. Shops and stores were closed 
and all business was suspended at the hour of his 
preaching. Having learned for himself from the 
Scriptures the great need of reform within the 
Church and the State, he insisted on others study- 
ing the Scriptures as containing all good. He 
denounced unsparingly all crime and injustice 
from King to Pope. He cried aloud and spared 



86 A FAMILY QUABBEL. 

not. He was particularly severe against the of- 
fenses of the leaders in the Church, the Pope, the 
cardinals, the priests and the monks, and the 
petty tyrannies of the princes, calling loudly for 
repentance and reformation. 

Of course the Pope disliked his plain speech, 
and sent him word to be more discreet in his 
public utterances, to which the great preacher 
replied: "Tell the Pope, in my name, to repent 
of his sins, for calamities from on high are im- 
pending over him and his family." He was sum- 
moned to Rome, but the people would not allow 
him to go. The Pope tried to bribe him with 
the red hat of a cardinal, but he utterly re- 
fused the office, saying, "Red hat! I wish no other 
red hat than that of martyrdom, reddened with 
my own blood." 

He took an aggressive part in political affairs 
and endeavored to build up a Christian Common- 
wealth, with God as Sovereign and God's Word 
as the only law. His greatest biographer says of 
him: 

"Columbus opened the paths of the ocean; Sa- 
vonarola began to open those of the spirit. While 
one was ascending the pulpit, the other was 
dashing his bold prow through the waters of 
an unknown sea. Both believed themselves sent 
of God to spread Christianity over the earth; 



"tbue mabbiages made in heaten." 87 

both had strange visions, which aroused each to 
his own task; both alike laid a hand upon a 
New World, each alike unconscious of its im- 
portance and immensity.'^ 

While Savonarola was laying his plans of Chris- 
tian Empire, Columbus was searching for a world 
where it might be erected and maintained. 



SOME OXFORD STUDENTS. 

Three Great Beginnings 

A Dishonest Guardian 

An Epoch-making Translation 

Something Happens In Germany 

Intellectual Sources Of The Movement 

**The People's Time Is Coming" 

A Series Op Revolutions 

Not a Mere By-product 



SOME OXFORD STUDENTS. 91 

^fTT It is not to be wondered at that those 
^^1 1 English students referred to in the fore- 
^1 1 going chapter, returned to Oxford greatly 
stirred by what they had learned in Italy. One 
of the students, Linaere, while in Florence, be- 
came a tutor or fellow student, in the home of 
Lorenzo de Medici, father of Leo X. Another of 
these students went to Italy after Lorenzo 's death, 
and while Savonarola was practically at the head 
of the Florentine Republic, and while the scan- 
dals of the worst of all Rome's popes, Alexander 
VI., were in everybody's mouth. This student, 
John Colet, caught the spirit, not only of the 
revival of learning, but of religious reform as 
well, and on his return to Oxford started the 
movement that was to influence Europe mightily. 
He made many disciples and did much to pro- 
mote that religion which consists in love to 
God, and to one's neighbor and which gives men 
a new motive and ruling power in life. Sir 
Thomas More became his devoted fellow-worker. 
Just about this time a boy, who was heir to a 
little stock of money, was thrown into a mon- 
astery by his dishonest guardian who was anxious 
to get the boy's money. But when the boy be- 
came of age he rebelled, left the monastery, 
earned his living by giving lessons to private 
pupils, and worked his way up to such learning 



92 A FAMILY QUABBEI.. 

as the university of Paris could give him. He 
was too poor to go to Italy, and came to Ox- 
ford by invitation of an English nobleman. His 
health was ruined by the privations and hardships 
he had suffered, but his mental energy rose su- 
perior to his bodily infirmities and, arriving at 
Oxford, Erasmus fell in with the little company 
of students afore-named. These three friends 
were scattered temporarily, but we shall hear 
much of them in the stirring times just at hand. 

Erasmus started for Italy, but was robbed on 
the way and had to stop in France. Colet re- 
mained at Oxford. More ultimately entered par- 
liament. Erasmus wrote his immortal "Praise 
of Folly," the bold satire of which did much 
to open the eyes of men everywhere to the need 
of reform, and turned the ridicule of the world 
upon the pretentions of the scholastic theologians 
and monks. Colet became dean of St. Paul's 
and removed to London; and More was forced 
into retirement because he dared to denounce in 
parliament an exorbitant subsidy demanded by 
the King. 

More wrote his "Utopia" to describe the ideal 
commonwealth. The keynote of the work was 
that government exists for the common good of 
the whole people and not the whole people for 
the good of a few. 



SOME OXFORD STUDENTS. 93 

Erasmus, meanwhile, was hard at work on a 
book which did more to prepare the way for the 
religious reformation than any other book pub- 
lished during this era. It was his edition of the 
New Testament, containing, in two columns side 
by side the original Greek and a new Latin trans- 
lation of his own. It was published in 1516. 
The *^living picture" of Christ and His Apostles 
contained in the New Testament was here pre- 
sented in all the freshness of the original lan- 
guage and a new translation. This work pre- 
pared the way for bringing the New Testament 
within reach of the people as well as of the 
clergy. It was the first step toward putting 
the Scriptures into the so-called "vulgar tongue" 
of each country. 

In Germany something else was happening. 
Of Saxon ancestry of the peasant class, Martin 
Luther, the greatest of the great Reformers, 
was born in Thuringia just nine years before 
America was discovered. His parents were poor, 
but they determined to prepare him for the 
law and so sent him to the university at Erfurt 
where later he took his degree. After gradua- 
tion, contrary to his parents' wishes, he entered 
the Augustinian monastery at Erfurt where, after 
great wrestlings of spirit, his soul found peace 
in accepting the doctrine of "justification by 



94 A FAMILY QUABBEL. 

faith." He accepted the whole Augnstinian sys- 
tem of theology, which was a part of the very 
Oxford scholastic theology from which the afore- 
named Oxford students were trying to set men 
free. 

It was while preaching and teaching the Augns- 
tinian theology at Wittenburg that Luther first 
saw and read Erasmus' new edition of the New 
Testament in Greek and Latin in parallel col- 
umns. Luther eagerly perused its pages rejoic- 
ing in the new light which it shed on many old 
familiar passages. But he was deeply pained to 
observe the difference between his own teaching 
and that of Erasmus, because Erasmus did not 
accept the Augustinian doctrines in toto. 

The scandal of the ^^sale of indulgences" was 
making Luther's blood boil. It had proceeded to 
the point where "every sin had its price." Leo X 
wanted money to help his nephew in a war he 
had on hand. To get this money he offered to 
grant indulgences, or pardons, at a certain price 
to those who w^ould contribute money to the build- 
ing of St. Peter's at Eome. The Princes, how- 
ever, were growing jealous of the diversion of 
their subjects' mone}^ to Rome. But the Pope 
overcame their objections by giving them a share 
of the spoil. Kings and Princes had made them- 
selves poor by their frequent wars, and a share 



SOME OXFORD STUDENTS. 95 

in the papal spoils of their own subjects was 
too great a temptation to be lightly set aside. 

Indulgences were granted those able to pay 
for them — and as for the dead, as soon as the 
money chinked in the money-box the souls of 
the dead friends were immediately released from 
purgatory. This was Tetzel's doctrine. Luther 
protested with all vigor against it, nailing his 
famous ninety-five theses against the door of the 
palace church and reading them the following 
Sunday — All-Saints Day — in the great parish 
church to all the people. 

With the years of controversy following we are 
not here concerned. But was it not more than a 
coincidence that at three different points, Italy 
England, and Germany — this greatest of all mod- 
ern movements was simultaneously begun? All 
the evidence of history points to a Supervising 
Will, shaping all the widely divergent elements, 
and even the opposing forces, toward a common 
end. 

So much then for the moral and religious set 
of converging events. Let us now attend to an- 
other series of equally interesting and co-ordinat- 
ing facts bearing on the civil or political move- 
ment toward the same end. 

The intellectual beginnings of the Reforma- 
tion may be said to date from the Crusades of 
the Christian nations. The original purpose of 



96 A FAMILY QUABBEL. 

these Crusades was to eject the "Infidel" from 
Jerusalem. In this they failed. But they awak- 
ened Europe to new ideas and new life. They 
brought the East and the West nearer together; 
and the Knights and Kings and soldiers who 
returned from the new lands into which they 
had gone, brought new thoughts and wider no- 
tions. Commerce was extended, invention was 
stimulated, and everything was done on a wider 
scale. The recent conquests of the Turks indi- 
rectly stimulated the cause of Christendom with 
new life. With the fall of Constantinople began 
the revival of learning in Europe. 

Learned Jews and Greeks settled in Italy and 
the ancient literatures of Greece and Eome were 
revived. A succession of poets, sculptors, paint- 
ers and historians, such as had not been known 
for centuries, arose. The invention of gun- 
powder gave war a wider scope. The invention of 
printing gave to literature the spread of new ideas 
with a rapidity hitherto undreamed. The mar- 
iner's compass extended immeasurably the mastery 
of the seas and thus promoted commerce with 
distant nations. A new way was being prepared 
for the advance of civilization. This is most im- 
portant — ^not merely an advance in wealth and 
luxury and population and military prowess on 
land and sea, but a vastly better, and hitherto a 



SOME OXFOBD STTJDENTS. 97 

largely unheard of way — a way of living together 
peacefully in civil society. 

The old civilization which had been established 
and perpetuated by conquest through force, was 
to be replaced by the new civilization which was 
to have as its aim the common good of all the 
people. The old order stood for the government 
of the many for the good of a few; the new 
order was for the self-government by all the 
people for the good of all. Of course this ideal 
was slow of realization just because it is so great. 
Not all in a day is it to be accomplished. After 
seven hundred years the struggle is still on. But 
it is encouraging to note the progress made to- 
ward the better, and that the progress is an ac- 
celerating progress. Europe has passed, within a 
century, from the absolutism which denied ut- 
terly the sovereignty of the people, to mixed 
democracies which allow a good degree of parti- 
cipation of the people in the aifairs of the 
State. If in a single century a whole continent 
has advanced from pure monarchy to mixed de- 
mocracy, is it too much to hope that within the 
next century it shall pass from mixed to pure 
democracy ? 

A series of revolutions, linked together as 
though planned by a single mind, and wrought 
out by a single hand, explains this gradual eman- 
7 



98 A FAMILY QUABBEL. 

cipation, which has had to depose both, feuda- 
lism and monarchy, in order to found over their 
portentous debris the perfect fullness of its 
rights. Each great cycle of history traversed 
by civilization has emancipated some human 
faculty or power. Herein lies the philosophy of 
the progress of civilization. The discoveries of 
the pilots and navigators in Asia and America 
emancipated nature and furnished new soil for 
the sowing of new ideas. As exploration widened 
the horizon, so the Rennaissance gave new life 
to the sensibilities and the imagination. The 
Protestant Eeformation in turn emancipated 
man's moral faculties, especially the conscience. 
Following the emancipation of the conscience, 
which converted every soul into a temple of the 
Most High, came the triumph of philosophy, 
banishing scholastic formula and unshackling the 
reason, of all man's faculties ever the greatest. 
With sensibilities, conscience, reason, and other 
faculties emancipated, one more faculty remains 
to be set free in order to complete and realize all 
the rest and give them potency of action — the 
will. To accomplish this great freedom of the 
will of the people all Christendom has been over- 
whelmed with revolutions. Many of these have 
failed, but enough have succeeded to create that 
one essential organ of democracy — a popular will. 



SOME OXFORD STUDENTS. 99 

The first of these successful modern revolu- 
tions was the Dutch, which expelled the remnants 
of the Burgundian dynasty from their narrow 
but wonderful little district. The second was the 
British which overthrew the Stuarts and laid a 
strong foundation for parliamentary regimen in 
Europe. The third was the great American Rev- 
olution which startled the Old World with the 
spectacle of the trilogy of personal liberty, a 
pacific democracy, and a stable republic. The 
last and most dreadful of all these, the one which 
condensed all the progressive ideas of all the pre- 
ceding revolutions into one, and which did more 
than any of the other three to popularize and 
propagate democracy in Europe, was the French 
Revolution. 

Reactions have followed as a matter of course. 
Three in particular are worthy of note — The 
Brumaire, or first Napoleonic, the reaction of the 
Holy Alliance, and that of 1850. Bonaparte's ef- 
fort to destroy the republic only revived the revo- 
lution of Mirabeau and of Robespiere, and Bona- 
parte carried on the points of his bayonets 
throughout Europe the very ideas which he 
sought to destroy. The constitutions of Ger- 
many, Spain, Italy and Portugal grew out of 
that reaction. In 1815 the Holy Alliance sought 
to seal the sepulchre of the people, and set up 



100 A FAMILY QUABREL. 

the dominion of a despot; but within five years 
the supposed corpse had burst from his tomb, 
disconcerted the Bourbon reaction in France and 
furthered the development of democracy through- 
out Europe. France was emancipated anew and 
Belgium was added to the list of free states. The 
premature democratic revolution in 1848 was 
frosted by th^ Napoleonic reaction in 1850, but 
in ten years it sprung up afresh in Italy. With 
the fall of Napoleon III., in 1870, Italian Na- 
tionality was consummated under Victor Emanuel 
and a better day dawned on a country endeared 
to Christendom for its glorious past and its classic 
associations. All over a new Europe the fresh 
winds of hope are blowing. That breeze which 
sprung up on the banks of the Seine whisked 
from the heads of European kings their crowns 
of divine rights. It blew clear across the Atlan- 
tic and scattered the American republics over an 
entire continent. The temporal power of the 
Pope is forever gone. Caesar's prestige is for- 
ever destroyed, while the freedom of the people 
grows and strengthens. America is blazing the 
way with no uncertain lead. Europe is following 
after as fast as her decrepit and archaic institu- 
tions will permit her, and soon the nations of the 
w^hole world Avill be treading the royal pathway 
of the people. As Gerald Massey sings, "The 
People's time is coming." 



SOME OXFORD STUDENTS. 101 

"Aye it must come! The tyrant's throne is 
crumbling. 
Room, for the men of mind make way. 

Ye cannot stay the opening day! 
The world rolls on, the light grows stronger! 

The people's time is coming. 

This phase of the subject has been dwelt upon 
at such length in order to show that the growth 
and union of these two great principles was not 
accidental — not a mere by-product of national 
progress — but that it was a vital part of the 
original order for the culture of the nations. It 
was an indispensable stage in the march of civ- 
ilization toward that "one, far-off, divine event 
toward which the whole creation moves.'^ If the 
facts stated mean anything at all they mean that 
for centuries before Civil Liberty and Federal 
Union were brought together here in the Ameri- 
can Republic, some higher than mere human 
power and ingenuity was at work preparing races 
and nations, their ideas and institutions, to be- 
come the suitable exponents of the new ideas 
which were to J&nd their highest and purest em- 
bodiment in the New American-Saxon Home in 
the New World. 

But we must get back to our story. 



BACK TO THE STOEY. 

Love as a Sentiment and as a Principle 

An Interlude 

A Great Socl\l Function 

Tea Made by a New Process 

Engased 



The Bans Published 



BACK TO THE STOBY. 105 

^vi I It was indeed an auspicious day when our 
^J I friend, Civil Liberty, sat as a learner at 

^1 1 the feet of the great Knox. No small part 
of the lesson he there learned was a deeper and 
more intelligent love for the fair maid who had 
already won his heart. Here he learned the wide 
difference between love as a mere sentiment, — a 
surface feeling with pleasing emotions — and love 
as an eternal principle taking hold of the deepest 
sources of his life with the very power of God. 
Under the inspiration of this master passion his 
cause, the noblest of causes, became like a beacon 
set in heaven, and yet attainable from the earth. 
The soul of the cause here entered into the soul 
of the man, becoming an intensely vital thing, 
and challenging every power of his life, and rein- 
forcing him with the power and the blessing of 
Almighty God. "Reality," says Carlyle, "is of 
God's making." Here the substantial reality of 
the great fact he was living for transported him. 
Because his cause was a true one it must and 
would prosper, and all the world could not put 
it down. He at once attained the dignity that is 
inseparable from the man who is possessed and 
transfigured by the glory of a great conviction. 

Reference has been made already to the passage 
across the Atlantic to the 'New World which is the 
estate upon which their New Home is to be built, 



106 A FAMILY QUABBEL. 

and also to the privations suffered and the limited 
opportunities to share each other's companion- 
ship. But now rumors are afloat of a great social 
function to be held soon in Boston. To this 
party both of our friends have been invited. It is 
to be a momentous affair and extensive prepara- 
tions have been made for it and great expecta- 
tions are indulged as to its outcome. Many dis- 
tinguished persons had a hand in the preparations 
and were present to see that everything went off 
according to arrangements, since great issues de- 
pended upon the proper conduct of the affair. 
The elite of fashionable Boston were out in full 
force. Among the most distinguished guests 
whose names were on the immortal "guest-book** 
were those of Paul Eevere, John Hancock, Dr. 
Warren, Josiah Quincy, John Adams and many 
others of equal distinction. 

The tea was made aft^r a new process which 
had been suggested by a prominent Boston mer- 
chant. He innocently asked, '^'Did any one ever 
think how tea would taste if mixed ^vith salt 
water?" The suggestion was all that was needed. 
Boston has always been ready for anything new. 
Enough tea was "mixed" that night with salt 
water to give the world a cup. The tea so prepared 
proved highly salubrious, particularly to our 
young friends. With its salt tang racing through 



BACK TO THE STORY. 107 

their veins this couple gave themselves each to 
the other in utter abandonment of love and de- 
votion. Here they plighted their troth, and 
from this "Boston Tea Party" they returned "en- 
gaged." It was the glorious consummation of a 
great movement that had been mounting toward 
a climax for twelve centuries. John Adams said 
of it: "It must have so important consequences 
and so lasting, that I cannot but consider it an 
epoch in history." 

This betrothal was soon announced to the world 
in The Declaration of Independence. 



THE COURSE OF TRUE LOVE. 

An Audacious PROCEEDiNe 

Troublesome Tears 

Opposition of the Old Folks 

Wedding Bells 

Wedding Guests 

A Very Modest Wedding 

Some Household Furniture 



THE COURSE OF TRUE LOVE. Ill 

^TV A proverb oft quoted, says, the course of 
^1 1 1 true love never runs smooth. True to this 
^1 1 precept, they found obstacles in abun- 
dance. Every possible hinderance was placed in 
their way. Policy after policy calculated to 
alienate them from the Old Home and from each 
other, was launched against them, until the petty 
tyranny became simply unendurable. The 
Old Folks objected to the Union chiefly on the 
ground that, when the young folks married, they 
proposed to do what, under ordinary conditions 
young people ought to do, * ' set up housekeeping 
for themselves,'' and that too, on a new, and as 
they conceived, a vastly improved plan. 

It was a sublimely audacious proceeding. The 
republics of antiquity furnished them with few 
landmarks to guide their footsteps in the new 
and somewhat perilous adventure. Prophecies of 
failure were as confidently uttered as one might 
repeat the alphabet. But, as is usual in such cases, 
all warning and argument were in vain, and noth- 
ing remained but the exercise of physical force 
to prevent the consummation of this "American 
Folly," as it was usually called on the Continent. 
A whole army was launched against the enterprise 
from the Old Homestead — an indiscreet proced- 
ure, for such is the temper of human nature 
under such conditions that, in this very armed 



112 A FAMILY QUABBEL. 

opposition you may read the sure prophecy of 
the coming wedding. Let a woman have hut 
the most ordinary respect for a young man, stir 
up a little wholesome opposition by the Old 
Folks, and she will marry him out of pure spite. 
Such is the glory of feminine human nature! 

Then followed a seven-years' struggle against 
Old World tyranny. It was the untried energies 
of youth, impelled by the imponderable forces 
of freedom, against an old and powerful king- 
dom bent on enforcing a wrong. But their youth- 
ful spirits ever rose elastic under every mountain 
of difficulty heaped upon them, and in every emer- 
gency freedom had some new sacrifice to offer. 

Shutting our ears for a moment to the roar 
of cannon and the clash of swords, let us attend 
to a matter to which few historians have given 
sufficient attention. Only the bare fact can be 
stated, elaboration is impossible here. The 
American Eevolution was essentially, from the 
stand-point of the Colonies, a conservative affair. 
With the Colonists, it was not the question of 
throwing off a yoke, but of refusing to submit 
to a yoke — to yield to a connection with Great 
Britain on new-fangled and degrading terms. 
The American colonies had never been under a 
yoke, strictly speaking. Their legislative inde- 
pendence had never been seriously challenged by 



THE COURSE OF TRUE LOVE. 113 

Great Britain. Now they were asked to surren- 
der that freedom and independence and come 
under the yoke of the British Parliament. 
Thomas Jefferson voiced the sentiment of Amer- 
ica in his famous words: "There is not a man 
in the British empire who more cordially loves 
a union with Great Britain than I do. But by 
the God that made me I will cease to exist be- 
fore I yield to connection on such terms as the 
British Parliament proposes." Not the Colonists, 
but Parliament was the aggressor. The Ameri- 
cans were the conservatives, on the defensive. 
But the movement, once started, out-ran all ex- 
pectations and imagined limits, and ultimated in 
the erection of a positively new nation. 

So the Young People won, as they so richly 
deserved, and at an haur appointed in the deep 
councils of the God of nations, the nuptials were 
celebrated, George Washington acting in the ca- 
pacity of High Priest of the ceremony. The sol- 
emn and irrevocable vows were taken before the 
unstained shrine of Liberty, a shrine made holy 
by the light from approving heaven shining down 
upon it. 

John Marshall, representing the very holy of 
holies of our political system, the Supreme Judi- 
ciary, supplied the wedding ring. Samuel Adams 
served as "best man," and Thomas Jefferson and 
8 



114 A FAMILY QUABBEL. 

John Hancock as chief ushers. The preparation 
of the Marriage Contract had been committed 
to the capable hands of James Madison. Benja- 
min Franklin, John Adams and John Jay wit- 
nessed the compact. 

God Almighty here put together in the Consti- 
tution of The United States these two fundamen- 
tal principles of our Republican Government. It 
is certainly a matter of the highest satisfaction 
that all our history up until the present time has 
but confirmed the decree : "What God hath joined 
together, let no man put asunder." 

The guests came from every latitude and longi- 
tude then embraced in our territories. They 
were characterized by every variety of genius. 
Gladstone says of the event: "It is of more in- 
terest to study than any other period in human 
history." He adds, as to the guests, "Although 
there were only thirteen millions of people in 
the thirteen states, the group of statesmen that 
proceeded from them were a match for any in 
the whole history of the world, and were superior 
to those of any other one period. I am inclined 
to think that the future of America is of greater 
importance to Christendom at large than that of 
any other country." 

The wedding itself was a comparatively modest 
affair, considering the momentous issues involved. 



THE COURSE OF TRUE IX»VK. 115 

Civil Liberty and Federal Union stood before the 
altar, clad in home-spnn which had been worn 
and shot almost to tatters in the prolonged strug- 
gle to overcome the opposition to the marriage. 
If they were poor before the War they were 
bankrupt now. They were poor in everything 
save in love of freedom and in the undeveloped 
possibilities of self-government, and in the vast 
natural resources of their great estate, concern- 
ing which they had only the most vague and 
limited ideas. Their entire household outfit con- 
sisted of an open Bible, an unfettered conscience, 
and the blessing of a Good God — a fairly good 
equipment for starting any home. The motto over 
their ample hearth, written so large the world 
might read it, was E Pluribus Unum. 

May not the world be challenged to produce 
their equal ? In the eyes of the Bride was "That 
light which never was on sea or land." 

An enthusiastic and admiring poet who was 
present declared of the Bride, 

"There lives more life in one of those fair eyes 
Than all the poets can in praise devise." 

In the young man's veins flowed the distilled 
quintessence of the best blood of fifty genera- 
tions. 



116 A FAMILY QUASBEL. 

''In beauty clad, 
With health in every vein 
And reason throned upon his brow.'' 

And now while they are preparing for the wed- 
ding journey we may be permitted to take an in- 
ventory of the wedding presents. 



THE GROOM'S GIFT TO HIS BRIDE. 

Some Important Distinctions 

Some Family Traits 

Some Fundamental Characteristics 

Some Family Jewels 



TH^ groom's gift TO HIS BRIDE. 119 

^fW As at most weddings, presents are some- 
^1 1 1 times duplicated, so we shall find here 
^1 1 that the lines are so often crossed and 
tangled that any attempt at historical sequence 
must be abandoned, except on the most broadly- 
general lines. And further it needs to be said 
that American history is not merely a foot-note 
to English histor>\ All the good things (in 
American civil life did not come from England. 
There will probably be several reversions to this 
fact later. But it needs to be stated here. 

First in order, of course, was the gift of the 
Groom to his Bride. It was not in any sense 
a mere fancy or ornamental gift, but one of price- 
less value. He incarnated in himself the best 
spirit of the Puritan, modified by the best in 
the Pilgrim. This incarnation was the biggest 
and the best gift he could bestow. 

Who were the Puritans? What is Puritanism? 
What was the diiference between the Puritans 
and the Pilgrims ? There has been much confus- 
ion here, and if, in answering these questions, this 
confusion can be brought into order, we shall 
obtain a more accurate estimate, and surely a 
greatly enhanced, appreciation, of the magnitude 
and value of this gift. 

The Puritan was not the outcome of any one 
race or eountrv. He was a child of the Reforma- 



120 A FAMILY QUARREL. 

tion — ^born out of the uprisings against the abuses 
of the Church of Eome. He attained his ma- 
turity upholding liberty against the assaults of 
kingly and Papal power. He incarnated the spirit 
of civil and religious freedom. The name came 
into use soon after the ascension of Elizabeth to 
the English throne, since which time it has had 
a varied meaning, sometimes standing for re- 
ligious agitation and at others for political. 
Properly it belonged to those Calvinists, members 
of the Established Church who sought to re- 
form the church from within. Until compara- 
tivel}^ recent times the Puritans have received 
scant justice at the hands of English, and even 
American, historians. By way of illustration, 
note a few of the epithets sober historians have 
heaped upon them: "Men of savage brutality," 
"Merciless and unprincipled tyrants," "Most 
senseless and reckless of persecutors," "Last up- 
holders of the cruel and ignorant creed of the 
witch-doctors," ^^Bigoted republicans," "Out-do- 
ing the ferocity of the Indians a hundred-fold." 
So the catalogue of slander proceeds ad libitum 
ad nauseam. What a gift from a Groom to his 
Bride! The mistake is in holding the Puritans 
responsible for what some reckless New Eng- 
landers did. 

They were Calvinists in religion and republicans 



THE groom's gift TO HIS BRIDE. 121 

in politics, and no one has ever questioned their 
zeal in religion or their love of liberty as men. 
It was not the Puritans alone but the Englishmen 
who perpetrated the offenses against humanity 
which want of knowledge charges to popular gov- 
ernment and a Calvinistie faith. When the chil- 
dren of Puritan fathers shall have learned to 
tell the truth about their parents they will have 
learned to respect them. 

The Pilgrims, to which company the Groom 
belonged, were rebels out and out against the 
policy of James I., who sought by pure brute force, 
to establish religious uniformity — an eternal im- 
possibility while human nature is constituted as 
it is — and separating themselves from the Church 
of England, formed churches of their own. They 
were exiles for religion. The Pilgrims went to 
Holland for about twelve years and then came 
to America, landing at Plymouth Rock. The 
Puritans remained in England while the Pil- 
grims were building their colonies in America. 
Learning of the success of the Pilgrims in Amer- 
ica, the Puritans, who comprised about two-thirds 
of the total Protestant population of England, 
determined to emigrate. This they did in large 
numbers, the first coming over in 1628 and set- 
tling on Massachusetts Bay. Though while in 
England they were staunch members of the Es- 



122 A FAMILY QUABBEL. 

tablished Church, they had not been long in 
America until they joined the Pilgrims in adopt- 
ing the independent form of church government, 
and becoming separatists like their Pilgrim neigh- 
bors. 

The Puritans are blamed for the execution of 
the Quakers, the quarreling with the Baptists, 
and the burning of witches. As to the truth of 
these charges the later historians, using the mod- 
ern method of writing history, are modifying them 
greatly. They were stern, severe, and rigid men 
in religious belief and discipline. They practiced 
short patience with those who disagreed with 
them in either doctrine or practice. There was 
doubtless much that was unlovely in the charac- 
ter of those Puritans. It is very easy, at this 
distance, to fling sneers at them, but Macaulay 
says, "No one sneered at them who had met 
them in the halls of debate, or who had crossed 
swords with them on the field of battle." 

It is unfortunate that Nathaniel Hawthorne, 
himself a distinguished descendant of them, 
should feel moved to say : "Let us thank God for 
having given us such ancestors, and let each suc- 
cessive generation thank him not less fervently 
for being one step farther from them in the 
march of ages." On account of their plain dress 
and close-cropped hair and psalm-singing and 



THE groom's gift TO HIS BRIDE. 123 

severe habits and simple religion, an easy-going, 
luxury-loving generation called them in derision 
"Puritans!" But those Puritans were the re- 
generators of modern England, and, with the Pil- 
grims, became the fountain head of all that is 
purest in life, highest in thought and deepest 
in character and truest in action in the life of 
the New World. They had convictions as high as 
heaven and as deep as hades and as strong as 
the mighty mountains of the continent they set- 
tled. They had the sense to hear the voice of 
God and the courage to obey to the last syllable. 
They could not be intimidated by power, nor 
dismayed by hardships, nor purchased by pat- 
ronage, nor over-awed by superior numbers. It 
was in the solid granite of these bed-rock convic- 
tions the foundations of this New Home were 
laid. We may abuse Puritanism as we please, 
but, as Carlyle assures us "It was a genuine 
thing." It was the beginning of America. 

Those who in England left the Established 
Church, were called Brownists, Separatists, or 
Independents, and from them came the Pilgrim 
Fathers who settled at Plymouth Eock. They 
agreed in doctrine and in almost everything else, 
except church polity, with the Puritans. They 
were a milder type of reformers, did not perse- 
cute others, were broader-minded than the Puri- 



124 A FAMILY QUABBEL. 

tans, and were more deeply imbued with the 
spirit of civil and religious liberty. The educa- 
tion which they received in Holland made them 
true liberals when the federation which issued 
in the American Republic, was first formed. 
They learned to love the refugees of other faiths. 

It was this Pilgrim spirit which deeply modified 
the Puritan character, dominating the early coun- 
cils of the colonies, and giving to us most that 
is distinctively American in our civil iustitutions. 
And so, in this strong Puritan spirit and faith, 
modified and made tolerant by the not less strong 
spirit of Pilgrimism, was laid the corner stone of 
American liberties — the choicest and most lasting 
and the most precious gift of Civil Liberty to 
his bride. 

These rich and rare Family Jewels which had 
been accumulated at measureless cost through 
many centuries, and gathered from many races 
and out of many lands Civil Liberty laid in the 
fair hands of his Bride. These Jewels were flash- 
ing with the glory of many a martyrdom, and 
were mellowed by the holy radiance of innumer- 
able sacrifices for the true Faith. They were 
"gems of the first water," and were enclosed in 
an austerely plain cabinet of wood that had been 
seasoned in the martyrs^ fires. This was the choic- 
est, most lasting, and, counted in the terms of sac- 
rifice, the most precious bestowal he could make. 



THE BRIBERS DOWRY. 

Wealthy and Aristocratic Connections 

Through Repining Fires 

An Original Document 

The Title — Deed of the People 

Education and Toleration 

Some Family Obligations 



THE bride's dowry. 127 

^TT The Holland ancestry of the Bride 
^^1 1 has been set forth already. She came 
^ll to America by way of England's Roy- 
alty, having been at one time a very pro- 
nounced, Cromwell-hating Cavalier. Many 
of her Father's family were down in ''The 
Old Dominion." However, the free air she had 
breathed during those twelve years spent in Hol- 
land before embarking to the New World, and 
particularly her occasional intercourse with her 
young English Pilgrim up in Plymouth, had been 
stirring to their profoundest depths all her best 
Holland traditions and principles. She has not 
forgotten that her ancestors were from a land that 
in art and music and commerce and industry and 
wealth was two hundred years ahead of Eng- 
land. Motley tells us that, prior to the revolt 
from Spain ^'Holland had a population of at least 
three millions of people, the most industrious, 
the most prosperous, perhaps the most intelligent 
in the world." They were a people with largely 
the same blood as the English, and with the 
same inherited traits of character, but very dif- 
ferently educated. Their courage knew no ^deld- 
ing. Some of the English Puritans fled across 
the Atlantic from a slight religious persecution, 
others remained at home and fought their king 
in a few pitched battles, and established a Com- 



128 A FAMILY QUARREL. 

monwealth which went to pieces in eleven years. 
But the Puritans from Holland fought for their 
liberties at home for eighty years, facing and de- 
feating the bravest and best trained soldiers of 
Europe, — with flames, floods, gibbets, pestilence 
and famine thrown in — and every other atrocity 
that religious fanaticism could invent, and every 
horror that ever followed in the track of war. 
Out of that eighty years war emerged a Eepublic 
that for two hundred years was the greatest in 
the world. Out of those refining fires they 
emerged with a new character. Having them- 
selves endured everything that could be endured 
for civil and religious freedom, they themselves 
never lifted an oppressing hand, but opened their 
own land on all its boundaries for the oppressed 
and persecuted everywhere to find a refuge. It 
was in hospitable Holland the Pilgrims found a 
refuge before emigrating to America. Many of 
the best families of the Puritans also found 
refuge here. 

Motley says: "They are the most energetic 
and quick-witted people in the world," and an- 
other historian of equal authority calls the Hol- 
lander "The Yankee of Europe." Italy first re- 
ceived the impulse of the revival of learning after 
the long sleep of the Middle Ages, but Holland 
caught the inspiration soon after, and it was in 



THE bribe's dowry. 129 

Holland where the freedom of the conscience and 
the rights of the individual citizen were first re- 
spected. These ideas made great progress in 
Holland. If printing from moveable type was not 
actually invented in Holland, it is certain at least 
that no other nation put the invention to better 
use. The first complete English Bible first made its 
appearance in Holland, the translation being made 
by Miles Coverdale, and not even in Germany, the 
home of the Reformation, were so many copies cir- 
culated and read as in Holland. This fact may ex- 
plain the deeply religious history of the Nether- 
lands. The first written constitution in Europe, in- 
deed for that matter in the world, was the treaty 
of Utrecht, binding together in federal union the 
seven Northern Provinces of the Netherlands. 
Five more provinces were added later making the 
total twelve. 

The University of Leyden was for a time the 
leading university in Europe. It was built by 
William of Orange to celebrate the lifting of the 
siege of the Spaniards from the city of the 
same name. The first act of the relieved people 
was to assemble in their several churches and 
return thanks to Almighty God for the relief from 
the seige. These were the men who, thirty-five 
years later, opened their doors to entertain and 
give a home to the Pilgrims from England. When 
9 



130 A FAMILY QUABBEL. 

France became Catholic the seat of learning was 
transferred from Paris to Leyden; and when it 
was settled that dissenters could not be educated 
in the English Universities^ they flocked to Ley- 
den in great numbers making that city, next to 
Edinburgh, the chief resort of learning in 
Europe. They were ver>^ wealthy, but wealth 
did not have the enervating effect it so generally 
has on a nation. 

The reason for this may lie in the fact that 
their physical position was such as to require 
constant toil to preserve their land from the 
sea. They were obliged to toil terribly. Tolera- 
tion became one of the fundamental principles 
of their Republic. It might, indeed, be called 
the cornerstone. All sects throve peaceably 
among them. Even the Jews, who denied the 
very Gospel, were not disturbed. This fundamen- 
tal principle they brought with them when they 
settled New York — ^the only one of the thirteen 
Original States which guaranteed absolute free- 
dom for religion. Virginia was the second to 
take this stand, but Thomas Jefferson who was 
chiefly instrumental in bringing it about, got his 
ideas of religion from France. 

We owe much to England, and our debt to 
her will never be denied nor outlawed. We have 
her vigorous language, we share her noble lit- 



THE bride's dowry. 131 

erature, we have many of her customs and modes 
of thought, and claim to inherit some of her in- 
domitable energy, practical sagacity, habits of 
organization, and general love of fair-play and 
free-speech. But all this is not saying that the 
United States is simply a bit of England trans- 
planted to America. N'o claim whatever is made 
that our Puritan and Pilgrim forefathers, great 
and noble men though they were, invented the 
American Republic on the passage across the At- 
lantic. ''What a marvelous magician's bath the 
Atlantic must have been to enable them to work 
such miracles !'' 

It may humble our pride, but we may as well 
bow our heads and hear the truth that: A free 
school system existed among the Romans, and the 
Moors possessed it nine centuries ago; That the 
towTiship as the unit of government prevailed 
in Central Asia, probably before the great original 
Aryan division of the race, and now exists in 
Upper India. These venerable institutions lose 
none of the '^alo of republican antiquity" be- 
cause, instead of being invented by the passen- 
gers on the Mayflower, they were simply trans- 
ported in that historic vessel. 

The English have never lacked appreciation of 
themselves. They are great lovers of themselves 
and of everything pertaining thereto. Even when 



132 A FAMILY QUABREL. 

they see a handsome foreigner they remark how 
like an Englishman he appears, and then express 
their pity that he is not an Englishman. It is 
a misfortune, though a very natural one, that all 
the histories of the United States have been writ- 
ten by men who were either English or of English 
descent. Thereby an undue bias has been given 
the indebtedness of America to English ideas and 
institutions. Whereas vastly more has come to 
us from Holland than from England; and even 
much of what has come from England had 
come originally to England from Holland. 
The grandfathers and fathers of the men who 
fought with Cromwell at Naseby and Dunbar 
received their military training under William 
of Orange and his son Prince Maurice. Crom- 
well's famous Ironsides were trained by Colonel 
Dalbier, a Hollander who gave Cromwell him- 
self his first instructions in the mechanical part 
of soldiering." The Puritans who settled Mas- 
sachusetts had all their lives been exposed to 
a Netherland influence, and some of their 
leaders had lived for a time in Holland. Thomas 
Hooker who gave Connecticut the "Typical 
Commonwealth," was a Hollander. Roger Wil- 
liams who founded Rhode Island was a Dutch 
scholar Avho read Dutch books to John Milton. 
William Penn, the Quaker settler of Pennsyl- 



THE bride's dowry. 133 

vania, had a Dutch mother. New York and New 
Jersey were settled by the Dutch West India 
Compan}'. 

Why, we cannot with scientific accuracy even 
call Europe the Old World since modern scien- 
tists are telling us with great assurance, through 
the study of the rocks, that the American con- 
tinent was in existence above the sea while prac- 
tically the whole of Europe lay submerged. 

As to the Dowry this fair Holland maiden 
brought her husband, we maiy truthfully say, 
"Many have done excellently, but thou excellest 
them all." Proud indeed must she have been in 
being able to bring into her New Home, for its 
present adornment and its future security, such a 
priceless inheritance, gleaned by her forbears 
from the fringes of the Middle Ages in Europe, 
and those of Abraham and the Pharaohs in Asia 
and in Africa, down through all the centuries, 
and from all the nations and races of the then 
known and unknown world — treasures so desir- 
able that whole nations opened their veins and 
treasuries in vain to secure — The right of free 
and fearless speech ; A high standard of morality 
in civil, as well as in religious matters; A free 
press; A system of free schools; and a declara- 
tion in favor of complete religious toleration. As 
the early history of the American Republic is 



134 A FAMILY QUABBEL. 

more deeply studied, and the more obscure ele- 
ments in its complex civilization are brought to 
light, and the silent, hidden streams of influence 
which make the Xation what it is are uncovered 
and explored, the more plainly will be seen the 
Country's lasting indebtedness to the rich and 
varied Dowry brought into her ^N'ew England- 
American Home by the Bride. 

This magnificent Dowry she presented in the 
priceless casket of the first written constitution 
for the government of a republic in the history 
of the world — ^the Connecticut Constitution, un- 
der which that community was governed for a 
period of one hundred and eighty years. 



SOME OTHER WEDDING GIFTS. 

The Huguenots 

John Alden and Priscilla Molines 

Scotland's Gift 

Gift of the **Old Dominion'' 

Puritan and Cavalier 

The Demure Quaker 

Some Other Characters and Characteristics 

Oi^ At Last 



SOME OTHER WEDDING GIFTS. 137 

^fW Having thus in order considered the gift 
^1 I of the Groom to his Bride, and the Dowry, 
I brought to the Groom by the Holland 
Bride, we may now proceed to examine the pres- 
ents brought in with most cordial regards and 
best wishes by the neighbors and friends. 

First came the Huguenots. They were French 
refugees, first coming into notice as a religious 
and political party about the middle of the six- 
teenth century in the days of Catharine de Medici. 
Perhaps no other people have so suffered for 
conscience sake as have they. Persecuted in 
France, they sought refuge in nearly every other 
country in Europe, intermarrying with the people 
among whom they found refuge, thus adding the 
strength and purity of their blood to all modem 
races. In America they could be found in all 
the settlements. Here also they intermarried, 
most numerously with the English and the Hol- 
landers. In large numbers they settled in the 
Carolinas and affiliated with the Covenanters. 

The Huguenots have been well named ^'the far- 
off drum-beat of the Eevolution." It was chiefly 
Huguenot courage that fought out at Quebec the 
answer to the momentous question : "Shall Amer- 
ica belong to the Romanists, or to the Protes- 
tants?" Montcalm led the forces for the old 
regimen, Wolf for the new. The one fought for 



138 A FAMILY QUABBEL. 

allegiance to king and priest and all the tyranny 
of the past; the other f ought for the habeas 
corpus, free inquiry, and a free people — 
for George Washington and all the future and 
undreamed glory of the American Kepublic. By 
all the accredited probabilities of war Montcalm 
ought to have won that day, because of his super- 
ior advantages. Both commanding generals were 
killed in the battle. Wolf and the new order 
won, and Wolf's patriotic cry when assured of 
victory, "I die happy!" was the "birth-cry of 
United States History." Out of the fires came 
those Huguenot sires, and out of the sires came 
the sons who were the heroes of Lexington and 
Yorktown. 

The Huguenots had been well trained to free 
thought and equal rights and the exercise of 
religious freedom. When these elements once 
enter vitally into a man's religion they will soon 
find their way out into his politics; for civil lib- 
erty and religious liberty are inseparable. The 
descendants of the Huguenots may be found in 
many of the most distinguished families in Eu- 
rope, including the Jloyal families of England, 
Germany, Prussia and others. They were a 
great people. They fought absolutism in every 
form, and loved liberty and ' * A Large-thoughted, 
Republican Church. ' ' They were -svilling to pay 



SOME OTHER WEDDING GIFTS. 139 

a large price for a great thing, and they paid 
their all for liberty. They companioned with a 
great God and compassionated with the oppressed 
throughout the whole world. 

Mrs. Sigourney, one of their sweetest daugh- 
ters, sang of them: 

'^On all who bear 
Their name or lineage may their mantle rest : 
That firmness for the truth, that calm content 
With simple pleasures, that unswerving trust in 
Trial, adversity and death, which cast 
Such healthful leaven 'mid the elements 
That peopled the New World." 

Priscilla, the fair maiden who gave John Alden 
^^the tip" that released him from his ambiguous 
and vicarious wooing, and herself from the do- 
mination of Miles Standish, the widower, the 
fierce little captain who had buried one good 
woman already, was the daughter of a Huguenot, 
William Molines. Priscilla Molines, who became 
Priscilla Alden, was the worthy progenitor of that 
most charming creature whose equal is not to be 
found in any other land on the earth, the Ameri- 
can Girl — who can take care of herself. What 
sort of a husband would a man, who had no bet- 
ter sense than to send a handsome young man to 
do his courting for him, make for a highspirited 



140 A FAMILT QUABBEL. 

girl like Miss Priscilla? Or for any other Ameri- 
can girl, for that matter? 

The Huguenot cause began two hundred years 
before the American Republic was founded — be- 
fore this wedding occurred — and antedated the 
Reformation in Germany by several years, and 
the Reformation in Switzerland under Zwingli. 
Like all other Reformations, it began by putting 
the Bible into the hands of the people. Like the 
Puritans, the Huguenots were Calvinists in poli- 
tics and in theology and were Presbyterians in 
church polity. The First President of the new 
French Republic, in 1879 publicly declared "The 
Huguenot Church to be the Mother of Democ- 
racy." Henry Cabot Lodge says, "I believe that, 
in proportion to their numbers, the Huguenots 
produced and gave to the American Republic 
more men of ability than any other race.'* 

So great were the persecutions they suffered 
that no great number of them came from any 
particular part of Europe. They came from all 
parts of the Continent. The traits of character 
they brought with them to America were vivacity, 
buoyancy, cheerfulness — all of which had a tem- 
pering and softening influence on the somewhat 
too severe austerity of many of their neighbors. 
With religious principles unyielding and incor- 
ruptible, they combined moderation of judgment 



SOME OTHEB WEDDING GIFTS. 141 

in non-essentials, and in social habits tliey were 
warm, simple and unrestrained. Their love of 
liberty was accompanied with a toleration which 
they had learned in the school of suffering 
through which they had passed. Cotton Mather 
said of them: "They deserve a place in our best 
affections." 

The Huguenot name of Baudouin, in its Ameri- 
can form Bowdoin, is held by the oldest college 
in Maine, founded as it was by James Bowdoin, 
son of a Huguenot and the father of a gov- 
ernor of Massachusetts. "The cradle of Liberty/' 
Faneuil Hall, was presented to the town of Bos- 
ton by Peter Baudouin, another distinguished 
Huguenot. They have taught Americans how to 
be cheerful and patient and invincible in persecu- 
tion and trial. 

Baird tells us that, "Next to the Puritans, we 
must unquestionably rank the Scotch as having 
largely contributed to form the religious charac- 
ter of the United States." The Scotch were in- 
deed the Puritans of the South. Unlike the Hol- 
landers, they were largely of Celtic stock, al- 
though the Celtic element in their character is 
not very marked. They founded no colonies or 
provinces, but were absent from none, and at the 
time of the American Revolution they were sup- 
posed to constitute at least one-third of the popu- 



142 A FAMILY QUABBEL. 

lation of the colonies. The influence they ex- 
erted in the world's advancing civilization has 
not been surpassed, in its far-reaching and benef- 
icent results, by any other people of like numeri- 
cal strength. 

It was the Knox reformation that became the 
Pilgrimism and the Puritanism of England. John 
Knox put a soul under the ribs of Scotland's out- 
ward, material death, and made her "A believing 
Nation." The fire kindled in the High Church 
of Edinburgh spread its flames afar. By the light 
of its burning things were revealed that men had 
never seen before. For fifty years the fire burned 
fierce^, and then, out of the ashes of out-worn 
tyrannies consumed, came forth the fair forms of 
a habeas corpus, free parliaments, and a general 
new order of things in both church and state. 
"It was the one phase of Protestantism that ever 
achieved the rank of being a faith." 

Looking into the face of his Queen one day 
John Knox had the temerity to tell her that, "If 
princes exceed their bounds they may be resisted 
by force." Froude declares that utterance to be 
the "Creed of Republics in its first hard form." 
The echo of that fearless word was heard at 
Gettysburg in Lincoln's immortal phrasing: 
"Government of the people, for the people, by 
the people." This great utterance which the 



90MB OTHER WEDDING GIFTS. 143 

American people have erected into a classic, is 
only Knox's saying full grown. 

The Scotch took a prominent and important 
part in every event of moment in the formative 
period of our government and her institutions. 
Knox had trained the men who helped mightily 
to promote the doctrines of the equality of men, 
the rights of free speech, and free schools, and 
liberty in religion. Their very name, which is 
a synonym for caution, has become a guarantee 
of courage and of the strength which helped to 
lay strong the foundations upon which the fabric 
of freedom was reared. They settled all along 
the New England coast, great masses of them 
pouring into the Middle and Southern states. 
They founded Princeton college as the Pilgrims 
had founded Harvard. They swept in floods into 
the Carolinas, made the states of Kentucky, Ala- 
bama, Tennessee, and even in Virginia they at 
one time out-influenced the haughty Cavaliers. 
They took possession of the Mississippi Valley 
and brought it and the State of Ohio into the 
Union. 

A full year before the Declaration of Indepen- 
dence was signed at Philadelphia, the Scotch Pres- 
byterian church of Mecklenburg, North Carolina, 
publicly issued its Declaration of Independence 
in these words: 



144 A FAMILY QUARREL. 

"We hereby absolve ourselves from all alle- 
giance to the British crown; we hereby declare 
ourselves a free and independent people." 

The manuscript of the Philadelphia Declaration 
is in the hand-writing* of a Scotchman, it was first 
printed by another Scotchman, a third Scotchman 
was the first to read it in public. These are per- 
haps only coincidences, but they give strong evi- 
dence that where anything pertaining to liberty 
^vas happening the Scotchman was near at hand. 

Just one more quotation: Dr. John Wither- 
spoon, first President of Princeton college, a 
Scotchman born, when the Declaration lay be- 
fore the assembled delegates, uttered these solemn 
and inspiring words : 

"To hesitate at this moment is to consent to 
our own slavery. That notable instrument upon 
your table, which insures immortality to its au- 
thor, should be subscribed this very morning by 
every pen in this house. He that will not re- 
spond to its accent and strain every nerve to 
carry into effect its provisions is unworthy the 
name of freeman." 

So large a place have the men of this stock 
held in our affairs that, of all those who have 
filled the office of President of the United States 
at least one-third have been of Scotch stock. 

To take out of American historv and achieve- 



SOME OTHER WEDDING GIFTS. 145 

ment and character the influence of these great 
people would be like taking calcium out of light, 
carbon out of diamond, cause and effect out of 
history. When John Knox gave to Scotland her 
national power and character, he gave to the 
American Eepublic a tremendous reinforcement 
in effecting and maintaining Eepublican institu- 
tions. Surely no better wedding gift could have 
been bestowed than that w^hich came from the 
people of whom Soiithey , the poet, wrote : ' ' Wher- 
ever they fled, a blessing followed them." 

The gift of Virginia, where the first permanent 
p]nglish settlement was made in the New World, 
is worthy of more than a mere passing notice. 
Certainly this contribution was to have great 
influence on the destiny, whether for weal or 
woe, of this great Family. 

As between the early settlers of New England 
and those of Virginia we find two widely different 
types of character and of social order. New Eng- 
land was thrifty, energetic and progressive. In 
Virginia, while there was some progress, yet Eob- 
ert Beverley, himself a distinguished Virginian, 
wrote, "I am ashamed to say anything of its 
(Virginia's) improvements, because I must at the 
same time reproach my countrymen with a lazi- 
ness that is unpardonable.'' There was consider- 
able individual prosperity, but there was no pub- 
10 



146 A FAMILY QUABBEL. 

lie thrift. Of course manual labor was scorned 
by men who kept slaves to do their work. 

Note also a civil difference. The founders of 
New England were disposed to settle in groups of 
families, forming neighborhoods, villages, and 
later, cities. Their churches were Independent 
and were always open to free discussion. There 
was consequently the play of mind upon mind, 
mutual stimulation, mutual forbearance, easy re- 
ciprocation of social forces, and facility in indus- 
tries and in trades, as well as in maintaining 
churches and schools and literary organizations, 
and the exchange of books and letters. This co- 
operation promoted progress. The New Englan- 
der first built his church, then his school-house. 
At the very bottom of our American system lies 
a broad basis of education. In Connecticut every 
town that did not keep a school for at least three 
months of the year was fined. 

New England made much of education and 
had its school houses everywhere. The unit of 
government was the township in the management 
of which the suffrage was unrestricted. The so- 
cial structure was that of concentration. In Vir- 
ginia the social structure was that of domestic 
isolation. Virginia had few towns and many 
large plantatioDs, hence the county was the unit 
of government and the civil power was in the 



SOME OTHER WEDDING GIFTS. 147 

hands of the few — the few being the rich plant- 
ers. They had no schools, nor wanted any. They 
did not care to educate either their black slaves 
or their white servants. Not until more than 
eighty years after the Jamestown settlement is 
there any mention whatever of, or any provision 
for the education of the youth. Berkeley's his- 
toric prayer is familiar to every school boy: "I 
thank God there are no free schools nor printing 
presses, and I hope we shall not have, these 
hundred years; for learning has brought dis- 
obedience and heresy and sects into the world, 
and printing has divulged them; and libels 
against the best government. God keep us from 
both." 

The church in Virginia was the Established 
Church of England, narrow, and intolerant. How 
low the tide of religion had fallen is suggested by 
the fact that men were fined for non-attendance, 
and a law was enacted by the Virginia Legislature 
compelling ministers to preach at least once on 
every Sunday and to administer the Communion 
at least once in a year. These contrasted condi- 
tions have been dwelt upon at such length in 
order to show the different atmosphere which 
surrounded these two young people, preliminary 
to the establishment of their New Home. 

As already pointed out, the Puritan character 



148 A FAMILY QUARREL. 

differed widely from that of the Cavalier. The 
Cavalier stands for chivalry, courtly bearing and 
refined manners; the Puritan for created man- 
liness and invincible virtue. Chivalry feared dis- 
honor, the Puritan feared to do what was wrong. 
Chivalry adorned life, while the Puritan enriched 
life with the strong convictions of conscience, 
duty and God. Chivalry would die for a lady's 
glove, a stolen kiss, a fancied slight; Puritanism 
taught men how to die for human rights, for 
justice, freedom, and truth. Chivalry was a sen- 
timent, beautiful as it was inspiring; Puritanism 
was a principle that had in it the strength of 
God and the age-old passion for freedom. Each 
needed the other for the completion of American 
character. To the glory of the Cavalier be it 
said; when the testing times came, he showed 
how he could suffer and sacrifice and endure with 
the sternest of the Puritans. The Cavaliers have 
suffered many harsh judgments, but they never 
have been called cowards. The men and the 
measures which have grown out of the at first 
unpromising soil of "The Old Dominion/' have 
added much to America's prosperity at home as 
well as to her prestige abroad. Virginia's gift 
could ill be spared from the Family Collection. 
A proper combination of circumstances was all 
that was needed to bring the children of the Cav- 



SOME OTHER WEDDING GIFTS. 149 

aliers into sympathy and active alliance with the 
children of the Puritans. Most of the Virginia 
leaders in the American Eevolution were lineal 
descendants of the men who had fought against 
Cromwell. Virginia has always known how to 
produce leaders. The Family Quarrel would 
have been settled much more easily but for such 
men as Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. 

And now comes the demure Quaker. What 
possible gift would be acceptable from this quiet 
and passive people? Would it be denied if as- 
serted that they bring w hat, in many respects, is 
the best gift of any offered? What did they bring 
for which America is the better? They brought 
an Ideal Civilization. They forced their way to 
America in order to make the *^holy experiment 
of a free colony for all mankind." William Penn, 
the supreme apostle of this enterprise, secured 
from Charles II., in lieu of money owed his fa- 
ther by the Crown, a grant of land covering the 
State of Pennsylvania. Penn's ideals for his co- 
lonial government were high: equal toleration 
for all religious beliefs, no resort to military 
force, even for defense, kindness and Justice to 
the Indians, no oaths to be used in the administra- 
tion of justice. These high ideals have never 
been entirely realized, but much of their spirit 
has been grafted into American institutions. 



150 A FAMILY QUAEBEL. 

The Quakers were the consistent and the per- 
sistent advocates of liberty for the white man, 
for the black man, for the red man, and for all 
other men. 

In church organization they had neither creed 
nor minister nor liturgy nor sacraments. In Eng- 
land they protested most vigorously against both 
despotic demands for religious uniformity, and 
the vassalage of either the body or the mind. 
Their contributions to the uplift of American 
institutions and American principles have always 
been salutary and often conspicuous. 

When seen at their best they stand for an 
ideal civilization. They hold the honor of being 
one of the few divisions of Christendom against 
which no charge of cruelty, selfishness or love of 
power can be laid. 

They served the State by what they were. 
The Puritans whipped them, robbed them, hung 
them, but they kept right on asserting them- 
selves, and refusing to defend themselves, until 
by their patient endurance they wore out the 
whips of their persecutors and brought scourge 
and scaffold into public disgrace. Won over by 
their beautiful spirit, the public finally rose up 
and demanded that the persecutions cease. 

Penn was democratic in spirit. N'ote his defi- 
nition of a free government : "Any government is 



SOME OTHKR WEDDING GIFTS. 151 

free when the people are a party to the laws en- 
acted." He treated the Indians as brothers, and 
they reciprocated the treatment. One of the first 
facts we were taught in American history was 
that Pennsylvania was the only colony settled 
without bloodshed. This colony was controlled 
for over a hundred years by the Quakers. For 
sixty years after it was settled it had no legisla- 
tion for defense. Its homes were full of sweet- 
ness and strength, and it was one of the greatest 
powers in the American Revolution. 

Jamestown was the first English settlement on 
the Atlantic coast, Pennsylvania was next to the 
last and, after the New England, the most re- 
markable. Strangely though it may sound, nev- 
ertheless it is true that, in spite of all outward 
differences and mutual dislikes, there was an in- 
ward kinship between the Pennsylvania Quakers 
and the New England Puritans. 

Penn was mastered by a great passion to be 
both just and humane, he began by inoculating 
his young colony with the idea of civic generosity. 
He declared his purpose to "support power in 
reverence with the people; and to secure the 
people from the abuse of power.'^ An equilibrium 
which even the best of rulers have not found at 
all easy to preserve. "Whoever is right, the per- 
secutor must be wrong," was one of his oft-re- 



152 A FAMILY QUARREL. 

peated sayings. Thus he established here in the 
Keystone of the invincible arch of Common- 
wealths one "over the turnpikes of which ideas 
traveled toll-free." 

But other gifts and other guests were in at- 
tendance. The German Lutherans were present 
with their high intelligence and morality. The 
Swedes brought their vigor and thrifty intelli- 
gence. The Danes and Norwegians^ the Protes- 
tant Poles and Piedmontese, men of stern and 
lofty virtue, invincible energy, and iron wills, 
just the substratum on which to build great 
and enduring States. 

Thus one by one they brought rich gifts to 
the feet of the Bride of the New Eepublic. Has 
an equal array of gifts ever before been laid 
at the feet of any bride, since Eve, decked with 
the de-w-pearls of Paradise and cro\\Tied with the 
first rainbow, received the new-made world as 
her wedding gift? 

Civil Liberty x\nd Federal Union — 

at last these two are one — and it took them nearly 
a century after the wedding to tell which was 

THE ONE. 

Returned from the wedding trip, they set them- 
selves to the agreeable task of getting acquainted 
with each other — which, by the way, is usually 



SOME OTHER WEDDING GIFTS. 153 

about the first and most important thing married 
people have to do. If they love each other de- 
votedly, and if they both have good common 
sense, it will be all right; otherwise, look out 
for storm signals. 



THE WEDDING JOURNEY. 

Exploring the Estate 

A Sublime Picture 

Some Sentiment 

*' Lovers Young Dream" 



THE WEDDING JOUBNEY. 157 

^JTTAnd now they are off for the *'wed- 
H^ll ding journey/' Instead of going abroad 
^1 1 for this trip they propose very sen- 
sibly to do some going at home. In other 
words they intend to explore, as best they 
can, their great estate. History is chal- 
lenged to produce a sublimer picture than is here 
suggested. Under skies the fairest, endowed with 
resources the amplest, surrounded by conditions 
the most auspicious, see this young Giant putting 
forth titanic strength, and marching with mighty 
strides from east to west over his prospective 
Continental Estate which had been deeded to 
him in fee simple by God Almighty, — ^who made 
it for him and had held it in sacred reserve for 
six thousand years until he should be ready to 
occupy it, — ^big with the belief that, not only all 
America from pole to pole will ultimately pass 
to his control, but that all humanity, to the end 
of time, shall be mightily influenced if not ac- 
tually dominated by him. 

By his side, in queenly dignity, walks his stately 
Bride, loveliest of earth 's fair maidens. The light 
of the morning is in her radiant face. Through 
her purple veins surge the bounding tides of a 
race-wide sympathy for the helpless, suffering vic- 
tims of imperial oppression and of civil and social 
and religious wrong. In one hand she carries the 



158 A TAMILY QUABBEL. 

distaff, eloquent symbol of her unwearying serv- 
ice to humanity. Her other hand is held in the 
giant grip of her kingly spouse, lending ardor to 
his strength, valor to his heart, and invincible 
mightiness to his sword. 

"Her voice is heard through rolling drums, 
That beat to battle where he stands, 

Her face across his fancy comes 
And gives the battle to his hands." 

And these two are one. Passing together over 
the desert wastes and poisoned bogs and swamps, 
the arid plain becomes a garden of gods, the 
springs of health leap from the rocks, and the 
habitations of death are transformed into sources 
of life. All along their pathway bloom the flow- 
ers and ripen the fruits of civilization. Com- 
merce builds her railroads and launches her 
mighty ships. Industry sings its daily song of 
happy and contented toil. Art creates the monu- 
mental masterpieces of genius — the dull marble 
speaks and the dead canvas glows with life and 
beauty. Invention reduces the drudgery of hu- 
man toil and multiplies the conveniences and 
comforts of life. Science masters disease and 
spreads its leaves for the healing of the nations. 
Education erects her temples of learning and 
gathers her students in the thronged gates of 



THE WEDDING JOXJBNEY. 159 

wisdom. While over all, religion, unbiased by 
sectarian interference, and uncompromised by- 
ecclesiastical pretentions, pours the heaven-en- 
dued wealth of her benediction, filling all with 
the preservative power of her incorruptible life. 
And these two are one. They are the voice 
of God for the utterance of his latest and greatest 
revelation of civil rights and civil duties to man- 
kind. They proclaim a message of manhood un- 
shackled and glorious, of citizenship intelligent 
and devout, of humanity broad and tolerant. 
Their advance marks the highest ascent of in- 
tellectual and civil achievement in human his- 
tory. Promulgating the profoundest principles 
of citizenship, they have awakened the deepest 
convictions of civil duty. In a word — ^they rep- 
resent the mightiest civil forces in the world 
working for the kingdom of God and the uplifting 
of the nations. 



ENLARGING THE ESTATE. 

Louisiana Purchase 

Some Wild Prophecies 

Some Corner Lots 

Florida — Texas — ^New Mexico — California 

Alaska 

The World's Next Great Empire 

Some Modern Improvements 

Family Resources 



11 



ENLARGING THE ESTATE. 163 

^JTT They returned from the wedding journey 
^^1 1 with a very much greater appreciation of 
^1 1 the vastness and possibilities of their great 
estate. Belonging, both of them, to a very pro- 
lific and virile stock, they anticipated a numer- 
ous progeny, and in anticipation of the multi- 
plied millions that should in the coming cen- 
turies crowd to their shores, and throng their 
door-steps, movements are soon set on foot look- 
ing to the territorial expansion of the estate. 

First came the great Louisiana Purchase, 
bought from Napoleon, who is suspected of hav- 
ing sold it for political reasons. The suspicion 
grew out of a remark which he made after the bar- 
gain had been closed : "This accession strengthens 
forever the power of the United States. I have 
given England a rival." The purchase price was 
fifteen million dollars — about $15 per square mile. 
President Jefferson had doubts about his con- 
stitutional rights in this purchase. The pur- 
chase was opposed in congress. Note some of the 
sage remarks heard in the debate : 

Senator White of Delaware, "I believe it would 
be the greatest curse that could at present be- 
fall us." 

Josiah Quincy of Massachusetts, ^^The constitu- 
tion never was, and never can be strained to lap 
over all the wilderness of the west * * * It was 



164 A FAMILY QUABBEL. 

never intended to form a covering for the in- 
habitants of the Missouri and the Red River 
country. To stretch it over them will rend it 
asunder. * * * You have no right to throw the 
rights and liberties of the fathers into ^hotch-pot' 
with the wild men on the Missouri, nor with the 
mixed though more respectable, race of Anglo- 
Hispano-Galo-Americans who bask on the sands 
in the mouth of the Mississippi. * * * * The bill, 
if it passes, is a death-blow to the constitution.^' 

Senator McDuffie, ^'Of what use will this terri- 
tory be for agricultural purposes? I hope to 
God we may never own it." 

The above utterances sound like anything else 
more than they sound like wisdom, considering 
the wealth of pasturage, mining, cultivation of 
the land — indeed everything pertaining to the 
sustenance and growth of a large and prosperous 
population. It is said that some of the men who 
most bitterly opposed the acquisition of the 
territory were in later years very anxious to ob- 
tain large personal interests in it. 

Florida was purchased from Spain shortly after 
for five million dollars. Then came Texas, and 
New Mexico, and California and the Gadsden pur- 
chase from Mexico, and to cap the climax, the 
purchase of Alaska from Russia for a trifle over 
seven million dollars. 



ENIARGING THE ESTATE. 165 

Every one of these extensions was opposed at 
the time by many good people; every one of 
them won subsequent general approval. Kone 
more heartily approved in later years the Louis- 
iana Purchase than did Josiah Quincy, who at 
the time so bitterly opposed it. In more recent 
years Hawaii and Porto Eico and the Philippines 
have come under the flag. From the Louisiana 
Purchase territory seventeen great states have 
been erected. Into any one of a dozen of these 
new states the combined British Isles could be 
dropped and there would be plenty of room to 
spare. Into these states have been poured mil- 
lions of our very best men and women. The 
American "star of empire" is already moving 
toward the Pacific coast. Prophecies are being 
freely made that the world's next great empire 
will be around the Pacific ocean as the last was 
around the Atlantic. American citizens need to 
be aroused to the meaning of this enlarged terri- 
torial foundation of the Republic. Our territory 
has been quadrupled and our coast-line tripled 
between the time of the Louisiana Purchase and 
the Gadsden Purchase. This career of territorial 
expansion is afforded no parallel in the history 
of the world. 

The broadening touch of American civilization 
means transformed lands and changed people, and 



166 A FAMIL1 QUABKEL. 

prosperous, law-abiding, intelligent American citi- 
zens. We must not shrink away from the new 
tasks and the new problems. We must meet them 
as we have met every other task and problem in 
our unrivaled history — meet them to master them 
for the good of the world. American capital and 
enterprise are overflowing everywhere. We are a 
great people with a great government and a great 
foundation and we must not be satisfied to do less 
than great things. 

From an area of 827,000 square miles we have 
grown to an area of about four million square 
miles; and from a population of less than three 
millions to a population of more than ninety 
millions. 

!N'ot only have they greatly enlarged, but also 
greatly improved, the estate. As they got be- 
neath the surface they began to find gold in the 
streams, and silver in the rocks. It is said that 
the images of all the sovereigns of the civilized 
world are stamped on silver and gold dug out 
of American mines. 

Consider just a few facts : We have a territory 
larger than all the ancient empires combined. 
Out of our single state of Texas can be carved the 
whole German Empire and have enough trim- 
mings left over to reconstruct England and Wales. 



ENXAEGING THE ESTATE. 167 

All England, Ireland, Wales and Belgium could 
be buried in the state of California.. 

Englishmen are proud of their river Thames, 
and Italians boast of their yellow Tiber, as do 
Frenchmen of the historic Seine, but their com- 
bined lengths would scarcely equal that of our 
Yukon, and you could pour all of them into the 
Mississippi at flood tide and they would not make 
a splash nor raise the river half an inch. Four- 
fifths of all the fresh-water on the globe is in 
our lake system. 

We have forests enough to build houses for 
the world to live in, and coal enough to warm 
them. We have wheat enough to feed the world 
and cotton enough to clothe it. It is said that 
the late King Edward derived more revenue from 
his personal investment in American securities 
than King George exacted from all the colonies. 

Transport yourself for a few moments back to 
the America of the days when the treaty between 
Great Britain and the United States was signed in 
Paris at the close of the Eevolution. Our terri- 
tory nowhere touched the Gulf of Mexico or 
crossed the Mississippi Eiver. Not a state had a 
million inhabitants, not a city could boast 50,000. 
Not even in the homes of the rich could be found 
a bath-room, a furnace, or a gas jet. There were 
no omnibuges nor street cars. There were no 



168 A FAMILY QUARREL. 

steel peus, envelopes, or postage-stamps. To send 
a letter from Boston to New York cost eighteen 
cents and required ten days to get an answer by- 
return mail. To write to your congressman at 
Washington from Philadelphia cost twenty-five 
cents. You would not find a public library, nor 
feel the warmth of a stove, nor see a lawn mower, 
a sewing machine, a revolver, a breech-loading 
gun, a friction match, a photograph, or a chromo. 
You would never have sent a telegram, nor heard 
a steam-whistle, nor talked over a telephone, — but 
why continue the well nigh interminable list, 
Look into a shop-window next time yon go shop- 
ping and remember that almost nothing that is 
displayed in that window was in existence as an 
article of commerce in that time. If a daily 
paper of the present having a circulation of 10,- 
000 were printed on the presses of that day, the 
first number of the edition would be three months 
old before the last number was off the press. 



A FAMILY HAVING IDEAS. 

Free Thought and Free Speech 

Temperamental Differences 

Drifting Apart 

The Great Debate 

Two Troublesome Questions 

The Family Market Basket 

The Domestic Servant Problem 

The Greatest Question 



A FAMILY HAVING IDEAS. 171 

^rrr This was a Family having ideas. From 
HI I the very beginnings of articulate speech, 
^1 1 the boys and girls growing up around the 
ample and ever expanding board, were taught by 
their forbears to do their own thinking. And, 
like their fathers, they did a lot of it. And they 
were not afraid to think out loud either. The 
freest and widest liberty of speech was not only 
permitted but actually encouraged in the Family 
circle. The greatest problems of statecraft and 
of economics, as well as the profoundest questions 
of ethics and morals and religion, of church and 
of state, were discussed in this open forum with 
a frankness and freedom that astounded the na- 
tions of the Old World. It not only astounded 
them but it made them afraid lest their own fam- 
ilies might catch the to them dangerous conta- 
gion of open speech, and break out into unruly 
debates. Nor were their fears without founda- 
tion, for men throughout the civilized world 
speak with a greater freedom because of free 
speech in America. This is a part of America's 
contribution to the progress of civilization. 

The members of this prolific Family had 
learned the art of thinking and the science of 
debate from ancestors who were skilled in all 
the arts of the forum. The children were in- 
tellectually free because the fathers were free 



172 A FAMILY QUABBEL. 

men. They flinched from no issue, and were al- 
ways ready to accept full responsibility for both 
their arguments and their actions. 

The years immediately following the second 
war with the Mother Country, were undisturbed 
by any agitating questions. It is known as the 
era of general good feeling. The condition of 
the Southern section of the Family was most 
prosperous. Commercial prosperity in the North- 
ern section was rapidly recovering from the shock 
of the war that had almost destroyed it. Dur- 
ing these years of general good will, the two 
sides of the Family had, perhaps unconsciously, 
drifted apart. Their respective interests and 
character were widely divergent. The North was 
absorbed in manufacturing, the South in agricul- 
ture. In character and temperament, it was the 
Puritan and the Pilgrim as against the Cavalier. 

The natural differences were revealed and in- 
tensified by the acrimonious debates which fol- 
lowed. Neither side of the Household took any 
great pains to get better acquainted with the other 
side. Selfishly absorbed in the pursuit of their 
own interests, they lost sight entirely of the 
deep common ties by which they were united. 
Mutual understandings would have prevented, 
as they usually do, endless trouble. 

If the North had known the South, or the 



A FAMILY HAVING IDEAS. 173 

South the North, there would have been no 
Quarrel. The Sunday morning followmg the 
firing on Fort Sumter, Henry "Ward Beecher is 
reported to have said in substance: There is a 
little war-cloud the size of a man's hand gather- 
ing yonder in the Southern sky ; there probably 
will be a few electrical discharges of artil- 
lery, and then a shower that will wash all the 
Southland clean. In that declaration he voiced 
the general sentiment of the North. He as lit- 
tle dreamed as did others that the shower would 
be, not a shower, but a flood — a flood of blood, 
fraternal blood. 

About the same time a governor of one of 
the Carolinas is credited with having remarked 
that he could take his riding-whip and drive every 
soldier north of Mason's and Dixon's line into 
the Atlantic ocean. Of course he might have 
done it; but he didn't even try. The North was 
generally looked upon by the South as a lot of 
mercenary slaves — too busy making money, and 
too tame to go out and fight. 

The Quarrel grew out of protracted and bit- 
ter discussions of two questions which ever have 
been fruitful in causing domestic trouble — the 
Family Market Basket, and the Domestic Servant 
problems. Almost from the beginning, the two 
sides of the Household had been divided upon 



174 A FAMII.Y QUABBEL. 

these matters. In the debate upon these two 
problems, a third question was brought to the 
surface — one which questioned the very integrity 
and unity of the Household. A survey of these 
three matters will aid us greatly to appreciate 
the spirit which, humanly speaking, seemed to 
render the Quarrel inevitable. The rather se- 
vere limits of this treatise will permit only the 
very briefest analysis of the situation. We shall 
get at the matter better perhaps by taking what 
seems to us to be the logical, rather than the 
historical, sequence of events. 

First, then, there was the question of the 
Market Basket — the Tariff, if you please. The 
South looked upon the protective tariff as fatal 
to their prosperity. It would increase their bur- 
dens by raising the price of practically all the ar- 
ticles they were required to buy. The large prof- 
its would enrich only the Northern manufac- 
turers. The tariff of 1824 had borne heavily 
upon the South, producing great irritation against 
having to bear all the burdens of protection with- 
out sharing any of its benefits. This irritation 
was greatly increased when the "Bill of Abomi- 
nations" was passed in 1828, and the constitution- 
ality of the act was questioned. The N^orth was 
outstripping the South in population and wealth. 
The Federal Government was in the control of 



A FAMILY HAVING IDEAS. 175 

the North. "The minority must be protected 
from the tyranny of the majority." Calhoun 
came forward with his doctrine of "nullification" 
and was promptly, though only temporarily, sup- 
pressed by President Jackson. According to Cal- 
houn's argument, the Federal Constitution was 
only a limited instrument by which the sovereign 
States had delegated to the Federal Government 
certain general powers. As soon as the Federal 
Government should go outside those limitations, 
the sovereign States had a right to nullify its ac- 
tion. Calhoun professed no desire to destroy the 
Union, but on the other hand claimed that only 
in this way could the Union be preserved. This 
was the South^s only remedy. 

But there was another question, even more 
irritating to the South than the tariff question. 
It was the ever-provoking domestic-servant ques- 
tion — the irrepressible Slavery Problem. 

Into this fair Home Of Freedom had been 
brought, as a servant, a bastard child, offspring 
of the tyranny of the Old World. Within twelve 
months after the landing of the Mayflower at 
Plymouth Rock, a Dutch Man-o'-War entered 
James river and landed an ill-fated cargo of 
twenty African slaves. No other cargo ever 
landed on American shores was destined to cause 
a thousandth part of the trouble this cargo caused. 



176 A FAMILY QUABREL. 

It grew into a great monster institution. It was 
fostered by certain peculiar social and industrial 
conditions. It grew and fattened on the very- 
vitals of the Family. It very early became a 
troublesome factor in the political, and even in 
the social and religious life of the Home. Ben- 
jamin Franklin launched a brave attempt to have 
it cast out of the Family, the peace of which it 
was constantly disturbing and rapidly destroying 
altogether. 

It early became a troublesome child. As early 
as 1769 the Virginia Legislature enacted a law to 
prevent the importation of any more negroes to 
be held as slaves. By order of the king the Gov- 
ernor vetoed the bill. It may not be generally 
known that the original draft of the Declaration 
of Independence contained a paragraph severely 
denouncing the King — George III. — for uphold- 
ing the slave-trade, and putting the United Colo- 
nies on record as opposed to its further con- 
tinuance in America. But then as now, the "in- 
terests" were on hand to look out for them- 
selves in matters legislative, and New England 
Ship masters combined with Carolina rich plant- 
ers, and the ** offensive paragraph'' was stricken 
out — but by a very small majority. In 1784 
Thomas Jefferson prepared and had introduced 
into the National Congress, a measure prohibiting 



A FAMILY HAVING IDEAS. 177 

all extension of slavery in the National Domain, 
the very principle upon which seventy years later 
the Republican Party was founded. If Jefferson 
could have established the principle at that time 
it would have changed the entire course of Amer- 
ican history. Jefferson did all that any man in 
his times could do to have Virginia taken out of 
the list of slave-states. The whole institution 
was extremely obnoxious to him in every way. 
'T. tremble for my Country/^ he says, "when I 
think of the Negro and know that God is just." 

Compromise followed compromise, but it only 
grew stronger and bolder and more provokingly 
insolent. It wrapped its strong arms around the 
Church, around the State, around the Altar, 
around the Fireside It finally became so defiant 
that, when threatened, it in turn threatened in 
its overthrow to subvert, the very foundations of 
Christianity and of Civil and Social order. Not- 
withstanding aU of Jefferson^s pleas against it, 
his own state, Virginia, and the South generally 
sympathised with it. The predominating agri- 
cultural pursuits of the South made it profitable. 
The manufacturing North had sold its unprofit- 
able slaves to the agricultural South where they 
could be used with commercial advantage. It 
was a bit of "good business" for both parties. 
12 



178 A FAMILY QUABB8L. 

From a business standpoint, neither part}^ had 
just cause for complaint. 

As the North grew relatively stronger and the 
South relatively weaker, slavery became more and 
more a dominant issue in politics. Demands 
were made concerning it by the South to which 
the North was unwilling to accede. The issue 
gradually shifted from a conflict between agricul- 
tural and manufacturing interests, to one between 
slave labor and free. 

Every possible element of bitterness was in- 
jected into the discussion by the Northern aboli- 
tionists. With them, no contract or agreement 
was sacred that involved the continuance of 
slavery. They made no exception of the Federal 
Constitution. They preferred the destruction of 
the Union to living under a flag that sanctioned 
slavery. They bitterly attacked the slave own- 
ers and the South in general. The South was 
proud and sensitive, and resented with equal heat 
any criticism of any of her peculiar institutions. 

Again and again in these discussions the ques- 
tion of the sovereignty of the states, and their 
right to secede from the Union, was brought to 
the surface. This brings up the consideration of 
the third issue raised — the Integrity and Unity 
of the Household. 

The right of a state to withdraw from the 



A FAMILY HAVING IDEAS. 179 

Union was claimed on the theory that the sov- 
ereignty of individual states forming a confed- 
eracy, or union, had not been absorbed into a 
new sovereignty. It is a right which has often 
been claimed by weaker states when their rights 
were threatened by the stronger. The history of 
Europe furnishes many illustrations of this ac- 
tion. Denmark, Norway, Sweden are conspicu- 
ous examples. Indeed voluntary separations were 
frequently discussed in the North. The Legisla- 
ture of Massachusetts threatened to secede if the 
Louisiana Purchase was consummated. A con- 
vention of New England states in 1814 threatened 
to secede if certain ends could not be gained. At 
least three states came into the Union with the 
-distinct provision that they might retire from it 
whenever they wished. 

It has been claimed by distinguished historians 
that, as a matter of fact, from the historical point 
of view, neither side of the Household was right 
in the contentions which culminated in 1861. 
The United States was not a Nation, neither were 
the states sovereign; but from the embryo po- 
litical communities of 1776-1778, in which no 
proper sovereignty existed anywhere, two nation- 
alities were slowly evolved, and two sovereignties 
were formed. The North and South each ful- 
filled most of the requirements for a Nation, but 



180 A FAMILY QUARREL. 

they were mutually unlike, and even hostile. 
According to this view, the sovereignty of the 
States was recognized in the Articles of Con- 
federation, and this recognition was not surren- 
dered under the Federal Constitution. 

Boston, in the North, and Charleston, in the 
South, were the social, commercial, and political 
storm centres. The controversy raged around 
three men particular^, though many others were 
drawn into the maelstrom. President Jackson's 
creed was: "The Union must and shall he pre- 
served." John C. Calhoun regarded the Federal 
Constitution as a compact or league between 
Sovereign States. Daniel Webster proclaimed, 
"Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and 
inseparable." 

As a matter of fact the whole argument turned 
upon what the American people really did, or in- 
tended to do, when they adopted the Federal 
Constitution. Did they simply create a league 
between sovereign states, or did they create a 
National Government? Did they mean that this 
National Government should operate immediately 
upon individuals, and, without superseding the 
state government, stand superior to them and 
claim a prior allegiance from all citizens? It 
ought not to be difficult to see now that, in point 
of fact, they did create such a National Govern- 



A FAMILY HAVING IDEAS. 181 

ment. Whether they realized at the time the 
vast import of what they were doing is another 
question. Webster's main contention, which he 
sustained with collossal strength, was, that our 
fathers formed a regular popular government, as 
against a mere league, and that the Federal Con- 
stitution was something more than "an amend- 
ment to the Articles of Confederation." If we 
are to have a government it must act like other 
governments, by majorities. This Government, 
through its Supreme Court, must be the ultimate 
expounder and interpreter of its own powers. 

Gradually, under these stirring debates, the 
slumbering spirit of national pride awoke in 
Northern hearts. When the North fully grasped 
the situation, its decision was as quick and as de- 
cisive as a slice of the Day of Judgment. This 
feeling crystallized instantly when Lincoln came 
forward with his famous declarations : "The slav- 
ery question never can be successfully comprom- 
ised." "This Government cannot exist half slave 
and half free. A house divided against itself can- 
not stand. I do not expect the house to fall, but 
I do expect that it will cease to be divided." He 
would save the Union without disturbing slavery 
if he could do so; if not, then slavery must go 
and the Union must be preserved at any cost. 

The issue was clearly drawn. Prominent and 



182 A FAMILY QUAEBEL. 

influential Northern papers, particularly the New 
York Tribune, favored allowing those states 
which desired to leave the Union, to go in peace. 
Throughout the South the hot Cavalier blood was 
racing furiously. Events happened with bewil- 
dering rapidity, and, 'ere the Nation was half 
aware, the greatest Civil War in human history 
was on. 



THE QUARBEL. 

A Home Not Built In a Day 

Testing the Foundations 

The Great Arbitrator 

Worth All It Cost 

A Compromising Situation 

''Unfinished Business" 

Chastened and Delivered 

Better Understandings 

Two Theories of Household Government 

Increased Prosperity 

A Bold Prophecy 



THE QUABBEL. 185 

^fTT This political structure had not been built 
HI I in a day. The treasures this Home con- 
^1 1 tained had been accumulated during more 
than two thousand years. Among them were the 
more or less perfected efforts at self-government 
in all time and among all civilized peoples. Fur- 
thermore, the responsible heads of the Family de- 
sired to test the foundations upon which this 
Union had been built. Was this Home a mere 
partnership affair, dissolvable at the will of either 
party to the contract ? Or was it, as they surely 
intended, a true marriage that had been con- 
ceived in freedom and was a league of soul and 
body for life, dissolvable neither by states nor 
by men? Was it an establishment, or was it a 
Home? These were the questions which had 
been agitating the entire Household, and, under 
some form of political subterfuge or other, for 
half a century destroying its peace. They must 
now be faced in their naked reality and settled 
for all time. 

By virtue of the authority conferred on him 
by the Marriage Contract, Abraham Lincoln had 
complete jurisdiction in the settlement of the 
case. His position has been stated on a previous 
page. The Union must be preserved, let what 
else go that may. ^^Our First American" had the 
opportunity. He also had the prophetic vision of 



186 A FAMILY QUABBEL. 

wise measures, and the high quality of courage to 
heroically enforce them. He first filled up the 
front yard with a million armed men. He then 
stripped from the Marriage Contract all the 
shameful compromises and concessions by which 
it had been misinterpreted; then turned it over 
and wrote the Emancipation Proclamation on the 
reverse side of it. 

The physical struggle was severe beyond pre- 
cedent because Americans fought on both sides. 
It was costly beyond estimate in lives and treas- 
ure; but it was worth all it cost, for it east the 
apple of discord into hades, cemented the Union 
of the Family with new strength, and gave the 
nations around the world a new pulse-beat for 
freedom. 

Consider some of the compromising conditions 
under which this proud, boastful and rapidly 
growing Family had been living. The same na- 
tion that had framed the Declaration of Indepen- 
dence and had poured out its choicest blood and 
its costliest treasure to vindicate the principle of 
that Declaration before the world, had for nearly 
a century denied to a whole race the very same 
rights for which she had so valiantly contended in 
her own behalf. She had made large investments 
in her fellow men, and had in time produced a 
race having no rights which others were bound 



THE QUAKBiaL. 187 

to respect. Wrong in any land, here where a 
nation was building itself up on the idea of in- 
dividual equality before the law, the wrong be- 
came a crime. 

By the very laws of God upon which she pre- 
tended to build, she must be chastened and de- 
livered. The price of freedom must be paid 
afresh in the Nation's tears and blood; for the 
Civil War was but the Revolutionary War under 
the head of "Unfinished Business." 

Through those awful years of strife we have 
no desire to go, and presume our readers have 
no greater desire to do so than have we. Suf- 
fice it to say that it did not break up the House- 
hold. It strengthened, rather than weakened, 
the whole framework of the structure, and settled 
several very important points beyond further de- 
bate. It did not establish, for that had been 
established in the very beginning, but it brought 
out before the world in a manner as never be- 
fore, the true character of our government. It 
is neither a pure democracy nor a pure republic; 
it is both combined. Popular control of the gov- 
ernment is guaranteed by the choice of represen- 
tation on the basis of population, and the abso- 
lute equality of the states has been hitherto as- 
sured by equal representation in the senate. In 
no other country is there found this combination 



188 A FAMILY QUARBEL. 

of rule by both the people and the states. It is 
our one unique American feature. This feature 
was in the purpose of those who founded our gov- 
ernment — a government which might be defined 
as being a mild Democratic Republic, with strong 
leanings toward a conservative Democracy. 

Having thus been brought to a better mutual 
understanding of the principles upon which our 
government was founded, it might be said in per- 
fect fairness that the Sons of the gallant South 
have discovered for themselves what no amount 
or quality of Northern logic ever could have 
taught them: that local self-government can ex- 
ist in any true sense only where the equal rights 
of all are respected and when all are upheld by 
a great united nation. 

It has demonstrated that while this is a great 
country nevertheless it is not large enough for 
two flags; and that the states of the Union are 
united, not mechanically, as beads on a string; 
but vitally, as members of a living body. 

There are two ancient theories of household 
government. One is that the household revolves 
around the children. In this case every new 
member of the home becomes a new centre, and 
the result is increasing confusion and conflicting 
authorities and unstable government. The other 
theory is that the children should be trained to 



THE QUABBEL. 189 

revolve around the household. In this case the 
centre of authority is always fixed, and the fam- 
ily may multiply its members without limit and 
no confusion results. The government is fixed 
and stable. One valuable result of the awful 
contention was to locate definitely, and settle for- 
ever the centre of authority. It has been fixed 
beyond further debate. 

As the story advances its chapters brighten. 
It has brought increased prosperity to both sides 
of the Household. This is particularly true of 
the South. Under the enervating influences of 
slave-labor she was greatly hampered in the de- 
velopment of her natural resources, of the vast- 
ness and wealth of which she then not even 
dreamed. But under the inspiration of free la- 
bor she has applied herself to the discovery and 
development of these vast resources with a suc- 
cess which is simply phenomenal. A whole ^ew 
South teeming with industries has arisen. Her 
furnace-fires are glowing, her spindles are whirl- 
ing, her quarries echo with the blast, and a 
healthful glow pervades all her industries. Her 
manufactured products are today the successful 
rivals of those of New England in the markets 
of the world. 

I have the best of authority for the following 
statements: So far as the industrial South is 



190 A FAMILT QUABBEL. 

concerned, it would require a bigger ISTorthern 
army to reimpose slavery upon it than it did to 
remove it. If a full vote and a fair count were 
had in the states originally comprising the con- 
federacy, leaving out entirely the colored vote, 
they would vote overwhelmingly to sustain the 
verdict of the War. 

Henry W. Grady, once the gifted editor of 
*^The Atlanta Constitution," delivered an ad- 
dress in New York City not long before his 
death. In this address he uttered the bold proph- 
ecy that John Brown would yet have a monu- 
ment, erected by the sons of Confederate sol- 
diers, commemorating the freedom he brought 
to the white, as well as to the black men of the 
South. He then proceeded to show how "our 
late unpleasantness" grew not more out of the 
effort to make black men free than it did out 
of a vicious endeavor to make white men slaves. 
This prophecy was, of course, received with a 
due allowance for the enthusiasm of the occasion, 
and the hearty cordiality with which the !N"orth 
had received him. When the writer read that 
speech, and noted the remarkable prophecy, the 
impression upon him was one of amazed incredu- 
lity. * ' A monument to John Brown by the Sons 
of Confederate veterans!" Impossible! 

But some years since our faith in that prophecy 



THE QUABBEL. 191 

was mightily strengthened, when, standing on 
the historic heights overlooking the Hudson, at 
the time of the dedication of Grant's tomb, we 
saw sitting side by side, as guests of honor, the 
widow of General Grant and the widow of Jeffer- 
son Davis, while in almost interminable proces- 
sion there marched platoon after platoon of 
the Sons of Confederate soldiers who were proud 
of the opportunity to honor the great General 
who had conquered their fathers and had saved 
their country and ours. Some of those who wit- 
nessed that sight recalled the prophecy and 
thought that "more impossible things might hap- 
pen'' than its fulfillment. If further confirma- 
tion is needed, witness the recent reunion of 
Union and Confederate veterans at Gettysburg. 



THE HONEYMOOI^. 

Wedding Anniversaries 
**The Cotton "Wedding" 

Perplexing Family Problems 

** Undesirable Citizens'' 

How the Children Grow! 

Selfish Boys and Silly Girls 



13 



THE HONEYMOON. 195 

^TX They are yet in the Honeymoon of mar- 
^^1 1 ried life. The first few years of married 
^\\ life are not, in any true marriage, the 
happiest. Our fathers and mothers understood 
that when they named the wedding anniversaries. 
The first few anniversaries they represented by 
such common things as cotton, paper, wood, tin, 
etc., — useful things, all of them, certainly, but 
not expressive of high values. If the wedded 
fellowship shall last for twenty-five years it be- 
comes silvery in its preciousness, if for fifty 
years, it becomes golden in its glory, and if, un- 
der Heaven's enriching blessing, for seventy-five 
years, it is only the surpassing worth and the un- 
rivaled brilliancy of the diamond that can rep- 
resent its rich, ripened love and fellowship. 

In the thriving city of Philadelphia, whose 
very name of Brotherly Love made it the most 
appropriate place for such an event, this vigorous 
and growing young Family celebrated their "Cot- 
ton" wedding in 1876. So proud were they of 
themselves and of what they had done, they in- 
vited all the other families of the world to come 
and see what a splendid success they had made in 
the experiment of Republican Housekeeping. 
And the other nations came. And there was cer- 
tainly something worth-while to be seen. And 
the Nations of the Old World rubbed their eyes 



196 A FAMILY QUABREL. 

and gazed and gazed in amazed wonder; and said, 
**How did they ever do it, anyhow?" 

Of course in the raising of snch a large and 
rapidly growing family there have heen many 
things to contend against. They have had their 
full share of what might be called "family 
troubles," and they are still having them, and 
probably will have them for some time to come, 
particularly so long as so many people who do not 
like them, but who keep on coming to see them 
and persist so in remaining with them — well, 
there probably will be more or less trouble while 
this process continues. In every household where 
there are many children it is no easy task to 
nurse them through the mumps and measles and 
chickenpox and whooping-cough and a score of 
other complaints incident to growing childhood. 

This splendid Family has just fairly begun to 
raise and train its numerous and exceedingly 
varied progeny. In many instances it has had 
mighty poor material to work on. The only pos- 
sible justification of the product was that of 
Aaron to Moses in the case of the golden calf. 
"The people brought * * and there came out this 
calf." In other instances we have taken of the 
very filth and off-seourings of the earth, and in 
a generation or two we have turned out material 



THE HONEYMOON. 197 

which was worthy of the approval, and the honor 
as well, of the world. 

There are social troubles and labor troubles 
and economic troubles and financial troubles. 
There are troubles with little business and trou- 
bles with '^ig business." We are about the only 
family of the earth that has enough "big busi- 
ness" to trouble over. In fact nearly all our 
troubles are about big things. The plan of this 
Family is on big lines, her leading sons are big 
men, the problems she must solve are big prob- 
lems — race-wide problems. Her estate is a big 
estate and it takes big brains to manage it. Big 
visions of world-service are breaking before her 
eyes. When God made a big thing like America 
he meant that she should not do small things. 
There is a lurking suspicion that God had a lot 
of big things on his hands to do, and then he 
made America and rested from all his labors. 
This may not be good theology — but this is not 
a work on theology. 

Some of the boys are selfish and want the 
whole apple. Some of the girls are silly and want 
to be pampered. And most of the boys and 
girls are sometimes naughty, and a few of them 
are always naughty, and all of them occasionally 
have to be spanked into order and obedience. 
But wait until thev have reached full growth 



198 A FAMILY QUARREL. 

and have settled down to the serious hnsiness of 
"making America" — wait until they shall have 
put away childish things and have come to see 
and do as men. They may he counted on to 
make good. 

A former President of the United States spoke 
on a certain occasion of certain people as "Un- 
desirable Citizens." There are perhaps many 
such in America. But who are the men who 
most offend against desirable citizenship in Amer- 
ica? The men who bring the hot flush of shame 
to the fair face of American citizenship are the 
men who are suffering from the strong drinks 
of liberty and wealth to which they have had 
unrestrained access. They are suffering from 
the delirium of drinks they were not strong 
enough to bear. Whether they are on their 
head or on their feet they scarce can tell. They 
are only partially responsible for their deeds. 
But there are others who do know better and 
are responsible, and because they are stronger 
and know better they must use their strength 
and knowledge for the advantage of the State. 
High-minded, intelligent men must join with 
politicians and the Public Press to prevent the 
Great White Temple of American Civilization 
from being debauched by a carnival of blasphemy 
in which the demagogue is made a hero and the 



THE HONEYMOON. 199 

mercenaries, whether of capital or of lahor, spew 
out their loud-voiced mouthings against both lib- 
erty and order. The political trickster must never 
be allowed to persuade the people that the rattle 
of the dice-box is the thunder of the voice of 
God. 

But the children are all growing, growing, 
growing up into a splendid type of American. 
They are working out the great problems of 
America. The probability is quite strong that 
they will be able to do it without the aid of any 
outside advices. People who do not understand 
our institutions, nor even understand us, cannot 
greatly aid us in working out our character and 
our destiny. We must have the courage to ac- 
cept full responsibility for what we are and for 
what we are to do, and then we must accept the 
responsibility for the doing of it. 



THE GOLDEN WEDDING. 

The Family ''Grown Up" 

What Gives Glory to "Old Glory" 

The World's Faith In This Family 

"Westward the Course of Empire" 

Adopted Children 

American Citizenship 



THE GOLDEN WEDDING. 203 

^JTTFive thousand years hence when they 
H^l I celebrate the Golden Wedding they 
^1 1 will have something worth coming 
from the farthest fixed star to witness. Be- 
fore that time the family will be grown 
up. Gathered out of all the nations of the world 
they will have become full-fledged Americans. 
The world believes in America now; it j^ill be- 
lieve in it yet more by that time. The world be- 
lieves in our Union and in our Constitution. A 
wholesome respect is felt everywhere for the Old 
Flag. It is respected not chiefly because of the 
great Army and Navy standing back of it — those 
are amply able to defend it in any corner of the 
globe — but it is respected because, of the prin- 
ciples of liberty and order and personal oppor- 
tunity which it sjrrnbolizes. It is honored be- 
cause, to a degree not true of any other National 
Symbol, it stands for peace — world-wide peace. 
All Americans are proud of an ensign that has 
never lost a cause, nor ever espoused an un- 
worthy cause, nor ever floated over a battlefield 
upon which the Angels of Heaven need blush to 
contend for what it represents. Many will 
regard the War with Mexico as an exception, 
and no defense of that unfortunate affair 
is here intended. The Old Flag! There is 
only one ensign worthy to fly above it, and 



204 A FAMILY QUABREL. 

that is the Banner of the Cross. The one born 
amid the carnage of battle and the groaning 
birth-pangs of a nation; the other falling in 
the darkness out of Heaven amid quaking rocks 
and unsealed graves and the agonies of the dy- 
ing God-Man. The one standing for the civil 
and intellectual freedom of the individual and 
the State, the other standing for the moral and 
spiritual emancipation of the races of the whole 
world. An American Citizen had better dis- 
honor the American mother who gave him birth 
than dishonor either of these two symbols which 
unitedly signify that which makes motherhood 
mean more than it means in any other place on 
the earth. 

American history has abundantly Justified the 
principles of the American Commonwealth. The 
strongest possible faith is expressed in our form 
of government as being, not only the best for the 
development of American character and re- 
sources, but as the best for the world. 'No less 
authority than Matthew Arnold, never suspected 
of partiality toward things x^merican, has voiced 
the prophecy that it is destined to become the 
government of the world. Bishop Berkeley, as- 
suming the role of a prophet, sang: 



THE GOLDEN WEDDING. 



205 



Westward the course of empire takes its way; 

The first four acts already past, 
A fifth shall close the drama with the day; 

Time's nohlest offspring is the last. 

Who that has read the progress of history will 
question the prophecy? The world's sceptre has 
passed successively westward from Persia to 
Greece, from Greece to Italy, from Italy to Great 
Britain. Nor will proud, imperial Britain be 
able long to stay its resistless western sweep. 
Than America, it can go no farther Westward. 
Beyond America lies the East. To borrow a 
figure : "Like the star in the East which beckoned 
the three Kings with their treasures Westward 
until at length it stood still over the cradle of the 
young Christ; so the star of empire, rising in the 
East, has steadily beckoned the wealth and the 
power of the Nations Westward until it stands 
still over the cradle of the young empire of the 
West, to which the nations are bringing their 
offerings." 

Drilled into a rock on the shore of Monument 
Bay in The Old Colony of Plymouth is this coup- 
let: 

''The Eastern nations sink, their glory ends, 
And empire rises where the sun descends. 



206 A FAMILY QUABEEL. 

Only an infant is that West today; but that 
infant shall one day become a man — a giant into 
whose strong limbs there shall have entered and 
united the strength of many nations and races. 
It is the business of the America of the present 
to see that when grown to manhood that fellow 
shall be an American. A man imbued with the 
best traditions of his great forbears and able to 
transmit to succeeding generations the best prin- 
ciples and the highest exemplification of Amer- 
icanism. Henry Ward Beecher was fond of say- 
ing that when an ox ate grass either the grass 
became ox or the ox would become grass again. 

This leads to the remark that, though having 
a family, quite satisfactorily large of their own, 
they have nevertheless adopted many alien chil- 
dren from varied lands. They have opened their 
doors of citizenship to the world. Without dis- 
cussing for a moment the wisdom or unwisdom 
of this world-wide hospitality which at least does 
credit to their ample and expanding hearts — this 
does need to be said with considerable emphasis 
at this time : those doors of citizenship are opened 
to all, but with the distinct understanding that 
whoever enters, enters of his own accord and with 
the well defined condition that allegiance to every 
other civil power is forever renounced. No hon- 
est man can take that oath of citizenship with 



THE GOLDEN WEDDING. 



207 



any mental or civil reservation whatever. The 
man who, of his own free choice, takes that oath 
in its true spirit, is born into a new civil life 
in which every foreign thing, whether of state 
or of church, is absorbed and assimilated by Ee- 
publican principles and purposes. 

We want no German-Americans and French- 
Americans, we want Americans. Of all perni- 
cious appeals made by politicians the most per- 
nicious of all is for the German vote and the 
Italian vote, etc. What do we want with Ger- 
man and Italian or any other such votes in 
America ? We want American votes and we w^ant 
to vote as Americans only. 

IS'or do we want any German sections nor Ital- 
ian sections nor any other such sections. The 
segregation of those of the same nationality so 
as to group them into communities of their own 
particular race prevents their assimilation as 
Americans. All possible sectional, as all possible 
racial, differences must be eliminated. Even state 
rivalries must ever be but competitions for pre- 
eminent national success. 

There must never be any mention of North 
or South, of Saxon or Celt, of Cavalier or Puri- 
tan, when we are talking politics with an Ameri- 
can citizen; for we are one people the land 
over, singing one song, and that song is Union; 



20S A FAMILY QUABBEL. 

and knowing one Sovereign, and that Sovereign, 
the Will of the People exercised according to 
the spirit of the National Constitution. Ger- 
mans, Englishmen, Frenchmen, Spaniards, Slavs, 
Italians, and all others may bring us their pecu- 
liar gifts of genius and we will cast them into 
the crucible of our free Republican institutions 
and there will come out a solvent for the fusing 
of our own sectional differences and racial pre- 
judices, and we shall have one Grand Union: 

The union of lakes and the union of lands, 
The union of states none can sever; 

The union of hearts and the union of hands. 
And the Flag Of Our Union Forever. 



SEVERAL AMERICAS. 

The True America 

America Not a New Thing 

Methods of History-Making 

The Higher Patriotism 

The Family Destiny 



14 



SEVERAL AMERICAS, 211 

^fW There are several Americas, planted on this 
^^11 Continent. There is the America of the 
^1 1 soldier, a blood-stained America, begirt 
with fire and sword, full of martial music and 
the dull throb of marching men. 

Then there is the America of noise and boast 
and strut and show and pride of display and 
glory, the America cheered by the crowd, the 
hip, hip hurrah, America — on parade on Fourth 
of July. 

Then there is the America of commerce in 
which the trader is king and the insignia of roy- 
alty is the dollar mark; a land of mines and fac- 
tories; a place of ports for ships — an America 
vast, busy, bedewed with honest sweat, but a 
stern, hard America, where a man may go naked 
among stacks of clothing and may die of starva- 
tion on the door-steps of the man who is dying of 
gluttony. 

Then there are the scientific America and the 
literary America and the social America and the 
financial America and a score of other Americas 
none of which constitute the true America. They 
are mere petty, incidental, artificial nationalisms 
clamoring for our allegiance, but chiefly wanting 
our purse and our ballot. But they no more con- 
stitute the real America than a wart upon the 
finger constitutes the real, soundly strong body. 



212 A FAMILY QUABBEL. 

They are mere superfluous excrescences on the 
body politic. 

What is the true America whose glory shines 
through suns undimmed? What is the America 
whose fair fame has won renown and affection 
abroad? What is the America which has scat- 
tered blessings the world over? What is the 
America the very utterance of whose name has 
fallen like a word of hope into despairing hearts, 
and which has been a beacon to eyes bandaged 
by tyranny, and has drawn like a load-stone pil- 
grim feet long sore and aged in chains? What is 
this America? Let us make no mistake in the 
answer we give. It is the America of the Pil- 
grim Fathers and the framers of the Declaration 
of Independence. It is the America of the mis- 
sionary, the explorer, the emancipator, the phil- 
anthropist. It is the America of the Open Book, 
the free charter, the pious home, the sacred sanc- 
tuary. It is the America of the sacred Sabbath 
rest and the progressive Christian Faith, the 
America of the free school and the free press and 
the Christian college and the free thought and 
the equal suffrage. 

This is the America for which heroes and 
martyrs wrought, and saints suffered to make life 
possible and stir the grand enthusiasms of hu- 
manity. And this is our America. Around this 



SEVERAL AMEBICAS. 213 

America our affections cling, for her our prayers 
arise, in her our faith and hope find anchorage. 
To love this America is to love all humanity 
through her, and to serve this America is to 
serve the world through her. 

If the reader of these pages has had the 
patience to follow them thus far he will doubt- 
less have observed one thing, that this America 
is not a new thing in the world. The history 
of the great institution which we proudly call 
The American Kepuhlic antedates the Flood. 
The materials out of which it has been built have 
been brought from all corners of the earth, some 
of them seasoned as the earth itself. Speaking of 
the Constitution of the United States Mr. Glad- 
stone said: "It is, as far as I can see, the most 
wonderful work ever struck off at a given time 
by the brain and purpose of man.'' But the Con- 
stitution was not "struck off at a given time by 
the brain and purpose of man." The American 
Constitution is as old as the Hebrew Decalogue. 
The American Eepublic is not an accident. It 
is not something that suddenly happened. It is 
not the flowering of auspicious times. The Amer- 
ican Eepublic is a development, an evolution, a 
growth. It is the ripened harvest of the seed- 
sowing of the centuries. The faithful, patriotic 
finders of Betsev Eoss stitched together the 



214 A FAMILY QUABBEL. 

materials of the American Flag, but Betsey Ross 
did not make the flag. The blood of countless 
battles fought for freedom on every continent 
has stained its bars, and the righteous reforms 
of five thousand years of struggle toward the 
light have whitened its stripes, while the com- 
mingled blue of all the skies under which the 
earth has rolled in all the centuries of human 
history furnishes the background for its growing 
and ever brightening constellation. 

Motley^s eloquent Avords are pertinent here: 
"The American Democracy is the result of all 
that was great in bygone times. All led up to 
it. It embraces all. Mount Sinai is in it, Greece 
is in it, Egypt is in it, Rome is in it, England is in 
it, all the arts are in it, and all the reformations, 
and all the discoveries." Then summoning the 
march of the world's great events from the be- 
ginning of time, he ranks them in order thus: 
"Speech, the alphabet, Mount Sinai, Egypt, 
Greece, Rome, Nazareth, the feudal system, the 
Magna Charta, gunpowder, the printing press, 
the mariner's compass, America." 

John Fiske, the historian, points out three 
methods of history making; conquest without in- 
corporation, the Oriental method ; conquest with 
incorporation, the Roman method; and conquest 
with incorporation and representation, supposed 



SEVERAL AMEBIOAS. 215 

to be the English, or Western method. This last 
named method has been brought to its highest 
form in The American Republic. Here we have 
not liberty alone, but civil liberty in Union, and 
that not mere union but Confederated Union — 
it is Civil Liberty m Federal Union. This is 
the American ideal, and it is unique in this par- 
ticular, that, while it is a government by the 
people it is also a government by confederated 
States. 

To improve and perfect and make effective this 
ideal is the sublime task of American Patriotism. 
For the consummation of this Heaven-imposed 
task we need the highest kind of patriotism. We 
need a patriotism that can be hallowed at the 
alter and enshrined at the fireside, a patriotism 
as holy as a sacrament and as strong as an angel, 
a patriotism free from trickery and bombast and 
which, resting upon a foundation of righteous- 
ness, will breathe an air of nobility and develop 
the broadest and the deepest and the freest man- 
hood, and the most tolerant and unselfish and 
far-visioned statesmanship. We need a patriot- 
ism that will translate partisanship into public 
good, will hold conscience and honor above mere 
party loyalty — that will hold conscience, honor 
and party sacred to the service of the world 
through the public life and character of the na- 



216 A FAMILY QUABBEL. 

tion. America never has lacked, and never will, 
that equality of courage that will face death on 
the battle-field when the Country's honor is 
threatened. The courage that is needed to-day 
is of a still rarer kind. It is the kind that will 
stay at home and live for the Country's good. 
We do not need a million young men to go out 
and die for Home and Native Land, but we 
never needed more than we need now a mil- 
lion young men of honor and integrity and cour- 
age for the right to stay right at home and de- 
vote this honor and integrity and courage to 
public affairs. The patriotism we teach is too 
external. The flag flies over the school house, 
and that is well. The children are taught to 
revere it, and that is well. But let there be 
not less talk about "Old Glory," but more talk 
about what it is that gives glory to the flag. 
High-minded men are losing faith in Democracy 
because they see it so often allied with low 
forms of political life. The political problem of 
corruption will be to a large extent solved when 
good men, who are not cowards, will give their 
own personal attention to a great number of 
things which they now are accustomed to turn 
over to a lot of self-appointed and self -rewarding 
fellows called "politicians." The treasons of 
peace are far more greatly to be feared than all 
the treasons of war. 



SEVERAL AMEBICAS. 217 

There are riches thieves cannot steal — even 
from nations. Character is the one absolutely 
unassailable and unshrinkable asset — even for 
a nation. "America for Americans" was a slogan 
well meant, but unworthy of Americans. Amer- 
ica for the World is better. We have great re- 
sources and great powers and so much the greater 
will be our condemnation if we hold these great 
gifts selfishly for ourselves and refuse their un- 
selfish use for the betterment of the world. Our 
only right to them is that we shall pass them on 
to others. Circulation is their birthright. To 
surrender our American ideals of manhood and 
citizenship involves a sacrifice too costly to be 
thought of. The author is idealist enough to 
believe that when this Great Family comes once 
to see the meaning and the size of such a sacrifice 
she will utterly refuse it. 

"Land that we love ! Thou future of the world ! 
Thou refuge of the noble heart oppressed! 
******** * 

Keep thou thy starry forehead as the dove 
All white, and to the Eternal Dawn inclined. 
Thou art not for thyself, but for mankind, 
And to despair of thee were to despair of man, 
Of man's high destiny. 
Of God." 



218 A FAMILY QUAEBEL. 

Could any higher destiny be conceived for this 
distinguished and prolific Family than, when the 
King of Salem shall come in His Eoyal Chariot 
of Peace, under their ample roof may be found 
worthy representatives of the best civilizations 
of the world, clasping each other's hands in uni- 
versal fraternity, and all together kneeling to 
kiss His feet, acknowledging Him as "Christ 
Over All, God Blessed Forever." 

** Where the war-drum throbs no longer, 
And the battle-flags are furled, 
In the parliament of man, 
The federation of the world.'' 



AUa 30 1913 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 




